Re: Choosing D over C++, Go, Rust, Swift

[maik klein via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 24 January 2016 at 12:04:58 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar 
wrote:
On Thursday, 14 January 2016 at 13:47:39 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar 
wrote:
I wrote recently that I am looking at an alternative to C++ 
for a project currently being coded in C++. I am pleased to 
say based on preliminary investigations I have chosen D over 
Go, Rust, and Swift.

1. D appears to give me all the power of C++ - and in 
particular even greater power with templates.

2. D code is cleaner, more traditional (Java and C like), and 
easier to read and understand than some of the alternatives. 
Go is simpler of course and also easy to follow - but that is 
because it is a small language. I dislike the new syntax of 
Rust as it seems gratuitously different and (in my view) hard 
to read.

3. D gives me all the low level control while at the same time 
giving me the ability to write code at a higher level. C++ is 
similar but the other languages are all restrictive in some 
way or other.


Hi - just to give you an update. After trying to get some 
simple tests working for the past few days I have concluded 
that while D is the best choice for my project (after C++) - 
D's implementation and tooling is not mature enough yet for me 
to spend effort on a port. So I will defer the move to D to a 
future time - but my intention is to do other work in D related 
to my OpenSource projects around Lua.

I really want to use D as a better C / C++ so am looking 
forward to library developments that better support a style of 
programming that relies less on GC. Its not that I don't like 
GC - but I feel that the reasons for my using a language like D 
or C++ is control - else I would use Java or Swift or Go.

Regards
Dibyendu

I am in a similar boat, I don't need the GC at all and there is 
not much stuff in the std to support a programming style like in 
C++. Also I already run into a couple of bugs in the std which I 
am currently trying to fix or work around. It is quite annoying.

But it is still the best bet if you want to do any 
metaprogramming, I think I have tried all statically compiled 
languages so far and nothing really comes close to what C++ can 
do. But D even improves on C++'s metaprogramming and it compiles 
so much faster.

Actually I personally came to the conclusion that C++ is kinda 
useless for metaprogramming because the compile times will 
explode very quickly.

A small entity component system with compile time filtering that 
I have written in C++ takes around 15 seconds for a toy example. 
In D it is ~1sec and the number doesn't seem go go up at all.