On Friday, 28 July 2017 at 14:58:01 UTC, Ali wrote:
How do you use D? In work, (key projects or smaller side projects)
I did my undergraduate in CS where I picked up Python, Java and a little bit of C/C++, but Java was my most familiar language. When I started my PhD in an Engineering Maths department, I picked up Andrei's book on D as I had come across the language several times earlier but never had a good excuse to pick it up properly. My supervisor is more of a mathematician so I did not have any dependencies or limitations in the tools I chose to use for research. For the first year of my PhD I built models in Java with Python for scripting on the side. I was incredibly disappointed with the performance in Java, and having been learning D on the side during that year, I decided to rewrite it using D. I essentially chose D for the one reason many people do NOT choose D; I wanted a GC-language that offered a decent level of control like C/C++ and was much nicer to write than Java, but with the convenience of not having to concern myself too much with memory management. I was happy to tune for efficiency, but did not want memory management to interrupt my workflow when writing a new model. D was perfect for this.
in your side project, (github, links please)
I've been lazy with side projects since I am always trying to work on my maths and writing skills which are pretty lacking given my choice of degree.
Did you introduce D to your work place? How? What challenges did you face?
I've tried to inform people of the merits of D but in this department, we're heavily tied to Matlab for teaching. When I started, they switched up the undergrad courses and started teaching Python as an alternative to Matlab alongside C/Java, but there's still a lot of reliance on Matlab. I'd like to see them chuck Java and teach C/D but we'll see. At university, there's a lot of difficulty in balancing the necessities (C for embedded systems/robotics and Matlab for modelling).
What is you D setup at work, which compiler, which IDE?
I've been a long-time Sublime Text user, using DMD (rdmd is a life saver) and that's about it. I'm interested in VS Code with the dlang extension though.
And any other fun facts you may want to share :)
It makes me sad to see so many people disgruntled by the mere presence of a garbage collector. I like it a lot and while I am completely on board with moving toward making it more optional, I am glad it's there and would welcome speed improvements. I think there's a balance to be struck between allowing programmers to forget about the low-level memory management when writing programs and tuning memory management when optimising for performance.
