this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Jeez, what a rant. D was an interesting niche language a decade ago, but is it important in any meaningful sense now? It was supposed to be a better C without the bloat and madness of C++, right? But now, we have Golang (non-bloated, better C but with garbage collection) and Rust (no GC, less insane than C++, but considerable hair in the type system and elsewhere compared to C, partly to enforce memory safety while lots of dynamic allocation is happening). And we have always had Ada (no GC, less hairy than C++, memory safe by default, but quite bureaucratic and not very conducive to dynamic memory).
Where again was D supposed to fit into this? Does it check approximately the same boxes as Ada but with less bureaucracy? I've read about it a little bit but never tried to use it.
As someone who likes expressive type systems (Haskell, OCaml) and good concurrency (GHC, Erlang) it looks to me like Rust is attempting the right thing, for those who require deterministic memory usage and dynamism at the same time. While Go is nice if you like C-like simplicity and can accept some non-determinism. I don't understand the attractive application areas for D.
I wrote some stuff in D. The templates and compile time evaluations were really nice, it could do a decent chunk of what we do with Rust these days. It had reflection and other useful things. The vibe.d framework was also fairly good and impressive at the time. Actually D's async stuff is a lot nicer than it is in Rust today, but Go kinda beats it now. But being sick of scripting languages and no types, it was attractive as a reasonably high level and performant language. Java was still super crap, and dotnet was still super proprietary at the time.
But I didn't stick long because although fairly nice, it didn't take off. There's no libraries no community no jobs.
I feel like Rust is kind of a natural replacement and it's plain better. D is garbage collected but still low level and has a C FFI, which is basically free footguns for everyone. You get to do even more compile time madness and templating and macros, and it's memory safe. And the APIs are just nicer too, the D standard library is servicable but not as nice as Rust's.
They were too late to the game to try to make a semi proprietary language.
That stood out as the noteable quotable to me. I mean... Isn't that what it is?
D was sold as a better C++, way back then when C++ was stuck with C++98. To be more clear, D promised to be C++ under active development. That was it's selling point.
In the meantime C++ received 2 or 3 major updates, and thus D lost any claim to relevance.
Side note: Rust is the only of the three to have an ML-style type system, which is generally agreed upon as one of the most theoretically sound foundations. Also the point is that Rust does it precisely without requiring dynamic allocation, as opposed to Go, for example.
If you want to go even further into the type system weeds in a non-GC language, try ats-lang.org . :)