On Tuesday, 22 March 2016 at 11:00:44 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
we could pull it off), but whatever flaws D's const may have, the transitivity is a huge plus overall IMHO, and I would have said that the struct/class split was a huge win. It properly segregates the inheritance stuff to reference types while not forcing all user-defined types of any complexity to be reference types.
Well, it could have been a win if structs were more restricted and acted like non-referenced types (pure functional values without identity, just like a CPU register) + if classes were put on the stack (or many objects were allocated as a group) by the compiler as an optimization.
The problem is that D is trying hard to be like C/C++ in terms of low-level semantics, and then just about all the advantages are lost.
So, while I'm quite sure that Rust has advantages over D, I would not have listed those among them.
The big win for Rust would be some of the basic semantics and the aliasing guarantees for their "unique_ptr" system. Rust can potentially support better optimization and better correctness guarantees than C++/D.
But Rust needs a faster compiler, since the Rust feature set matters more for large projects...
