Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:25:35 +0100, Russel Winder wrote: > The standard paradigm increasingly in the HPC and large embedded systems > spheres is to have C and C++ application code coordinated and tested > using Python. Also the post-production community have C and C++ > applications but use Python for plugins and other dynamic code > requirements. Some games people have gone with Lua rather Python, as > has one notable graphics software company. > > Is this dynamic/static synthesis something D should embrace and > therefore get bindings for (D able to call into Python and Python able > to call D -- cf. ctypes package in Python) or is it seeking to try and > replace the whole shebang. If the latter then perhaps there needs to be > a strategy to support data visualization (which is what the Python ends > up doing in HPC), extend the unit testing stuff to integration and > acceptance testing and have an easy way to handle dynamically loaded > code. > > (I know some of this exists already, but I haven't been able to > investigate to a deep enough level as yet.) > > (I should point out that currently I am approaching all this from a > Python perspective, i.e. that C and C++ is the language you descend to > when Python is insufficiently performant :-)
FWIW, this static/dynamic coexistence is becoming a reality also on JVM/ CLR. I think both C# 4.0 and Java 7 have these dynamic features and JVM 7 has better support for dynamic languages. It's really hard to believe D will replace all these languages with a single solution. The flexibility of duck typing combined with homoiconicity and compact syntax is something projects like DDL can't compete with.
