Ruminations on D: An Interview with Walter Bright

<p><pre><code> We nailed it with arrays (Jan Knepper’s idea), the basic template design, compile-time function execution (CTFE) </code></pre> One of my favourite things about D is that it has a full compile-time D interpreter. You can do &quot;template metaprogramming&quot;, so to speak, in the same language as D itself (it&#x27;s probably a bit more fair to compare it to how lisp macros are &quot;compile-time&quot;).<p>It&#x27;s a bit sad that Rust is getting all of the attention in the spotlight, because D is a great, modern, safe language. If you&#x27;ve only heard about D 15 years ago and never tried it again, give it another look. The current D is really a new language, which was briefly called &quot;D2&quot; for a while.<p>Now, if Symantec could just fix the stupid licence of the reference compiler...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.dlang.org&#x2F;thread&#x2F;lodjbuvdhimrvrdngldy@forum.dlang.org?page=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.dlang.org&#x2F;thread&#x2F;lodjbuvdhimrvrdngldy@forum.dl...</a>

I took a look again at D this last couple of weeks and it was a way better language than I remembered.<p>It seems like a very solid language. You can write low level C like code if you really want to, but it defaults to safer, higher level code without losing much efficiency.<p>I&#x27;m going to try it out with some bigger projects. I have some issues. Windows support seems a little flakey but it&#x27;s ertainly usable (the default dmd compiler works very well on windows but the code it makes isn&#x27;t the best it could be, and ldc makes much higher quality code, but isn&#x27;t <i>quite</i> stable on windows. (Although it&#x27;s certainly looking good enough to use).<p>I think it&#x27;s well worth a look. I like it a great deal more than Rust

<i>You were 42 when you started working on D and I guess it is the first language you designed? Talk about why you started working on it so late...</i><p>What kind of question is that? Anders Hejlsberg was what, 39 when he started working on C# and 52 with Typescript? It&#x27;s the same as with screenplays. You start writing when you have experience.

I like a lot of things about D, but I don&#x27;t like the fact that it seems stuck in the OOP fad from 15 or so years ago. Go and Rust have both abandoned this whole idea of making &quot;classes&quot; in favor of constructs like structs, enums, traits and interfaces. I wish D had gone this route as well, but other than that it seems like a nice language.

What I found interesting is that the two high profile projects mentioned in the post written in D are no longer maintained, which is kind of weird.

This video of a panel discussion at a conf was interesting to me:<p>Video: C++, Rust, D and Go: Panel at LangNext &#x27;14:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jugad2.blogspot.in&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;video-c-rust-d-and-go-panel-at-langnext.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jugad2.blogspot.in&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;video-c-rust-d-and-go-pane...</a><p>Key team members or inventors of those languages, speak.

Hows the Dlang GC these days? A year ago andralex stated that he was going to work on it[1], but I haven&#x27;t heard of that since.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2g03af&#x2F;ds_garbage_collector_problem&#x2F;ckent8c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2g03af&#x2F;ds_garb...</a>

&gt; I don’t worry too much about that. I spend my efforts making D the best language possible, and let the metrics take care of themselves. It’s like being a CEO; he shouldn’t be sweating the stock price, he should be working on making money for the company, then the stock price will take care of itself.<p>I wish this mindset was more prevalent in open source. I find that the best (most well-designed and useful) projects are those that don&#x27;t concern themselves with marketing.