On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 15:11:06 -0500, Nick Sabalausky <a@a.a> wrote:
"Steven Schveighoffer" <schvei...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:op.vpxkvij9eav7ka@steve-laptop...
On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:25:10 -0500, Fab <fab-cod...@web.de> wrote:
Are there any continued database projects?
AFAIK, there is very little DB support (which will definitely need to be
addressed before D is considered a complete language) for D2. However,
you *always* have support via C bindings. D has zero-overhead binding
to
C functions, all you need to do is port the declarations to D.
If you are using D1, there are several projects, I don't think many of
them are up to date:
http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DatabaseBindings
Adam Ruppe and Piotr Szturmaj have recently been working on some database
stuff. See the recent thread "Can your programming language do this?"
I have ignored that thread (I sometimes just ignore threads because they
start out uninteresting, or become uninteresting, and then I miss out on
some good stuff!)
I'll have to take a look, D2 really does need a DB interface -- badly.
I would say it is not ready for prime-time yet. It has a way to go, but
some have managed to build pretty impressive applications from it. So
it
would depend on your application.
Personally, I think that even though D still has some things to be worked
out, I think it's *still* far better than any of the other more mature
languages.
It all seems really good until you hit an issue that cannot be worked
around -- like a compiler error or a misdesigned feature. I call these
'mercy' problems, because you are then at the complete mercy of someone
else. If you have a deadline, or have a complete stoppage in work, you
really have little choice but to move onto another language or abandon the
project. Dcollections sat idle for about a year because of a problem like
this.
That would scare the crap out of me if I was a project manager trying to
decide whether to use D or not. I've had first hand experience with using
a product (from Microsoft) that failed so badly that we needed to have
them fix it (which of course took about 3 months). A year later, they
discontinued the product, and we had even more problems. I wrote my own
system to replace it from scratch, and everything works so much better now
(and uses less memory!). Not to mention, we have all source, so it's
always possible to fix. A small part of it is written in D1/Tango and
performs beautifully :) But I'd probably not rewrite the server in D
(currently in C#) because it's lacking too much support for a lot of the
things I do with it.
I'd suggest to anyone looking to use D for something really big to try and
"prove" out how well D will perform for you by coding up bits of your
whole project that you think will be needed. Hopefully, you can do
everything without hitting a mercy bug and then you can write your full
project in it.
There are also really scary possibilities that I've seen happen to a few
poor souls -- like hard-to-solve OPTLINK bugs. Those may creep up at any
time. Really, I just feel that D2's tools are not mature enough, or have
enough support to trust a professional product on it -- yet. I'm sure
this will change in the future.
BTW, I plan to write a semi-professional project in D2 in the near future,
but I'm 1) willing to take the risks 2) have no deadline and 3) not
depending on this project for a living.
-Steve
