On Thursday, 28 January 2016 at 22:30:51 UTC, nbro wrote:
Apart from [syntax], what are the real advantages of D over
Rust?
D is a broader language and is applicable in more situations.
In many cases you don't care and don't want to care about memory
management. Use D and its garbage collector and be done with it.
Rust forces you to think about memory management all the time,
because it type checks life times. If you hit some performance
wall during development, then Ds toolbox allows you to work
around the GC in specific places. So, convenience first and
performance where necessary. No premature optimization.
If you need more programmers, D is easier to learn, due to its
syntax. Simple C, Java and even C++ programs can be very directly
ported to D. For example, the D compiler frontend was converted
from C++ to D algorithmically. This does not work with Rust,
where the type checker will complain a lot.
D is more mature than Rust at the moment. Less backwards
incompatible changes. More reliability and stability.
D has three different backends with different strengths. With dmd
you have really fast compilation, which is great for development.
With the LLVM and GCC backends you get better performance for
release builds. With GCC you can compile for many architectures
(although you might need to port the runtime).
