I used D 1.x for doing games and demos, some of them are public domain open source (A, B, C, D, E). D can give you productivity unheard of in C++-land if you are willing to pay the high-price of arguing with everyone about why do you use D. If you go this route, i … Read more
DMD is the reference implementation, the backend and frontend are open source. The code generation quality is not that overwhelming. GDC and LDC are both based on the DMD frontend so it might take some time until a new version of the frontend is merged in. Since the backends they use are very mature and … Read more
Being context free is first a property of generative grammars. It means that what a non-terminal can generate will not depend on the context in which the non-terminal appears (in non context-free generative grammar, the very notion of “string generated by a given non-terminal” is in general difficult to define). This doesn’t prevent the same … Read more
The two biggest things that help template metaprogramming in D are template constraints and static if – both of which C++ could theoretically add and which would benefit it greatly. Template constraints allow you to put a condition on a template that must be true for the template to be able to be instantiated. For … Read more
To directly answer your two questions: Yes, creating class instances by reference does result in a lot of heap activity, but: a. In D, you have struct as well as class. A struct has value semantics and can do everything a class can, except polymorphism. b. Polymorphism and value semantics have never worked well together … Read more
(Flynn’s answer is the correct answer. This one addresses the problem more generally.) You seem to be assuming, OP, that the floating-point inaccuracy in your code is deterministic and predictably wrong (in a way, your approach is the polar opposite of that of people who don’t understand floating point yet). Although (as Ben points out) … Read more
The following information is out of date. It needs to be updated according to the latest Concepts Lite draft. Section 3 of the constraints proposal covers this in reasonable depth. The concepts proposal has been put on the back burners for a short while in the hope that constraints (i.e. concepts-lite) can be fleshed out … Read more
To enable all optimizations and disable all safety checks, compile your D program with the following DMD flags: -O -inline -release -noboundscheck EDIT: I’ve tried your programs with g++, dmd and gdc. dmd does lag behind, but gdc achieves performance very close to g++. The commandline I used was gdmd -O -release -inline (gdmd is … Read more
I do bioinformatics work in D. For me, the key thing about D is that it takes a very level-headed approach to tradeoffs and recognizes the principle of diminishing returns. Unlike C++, which adheres rigorously to the zero-overhead principle, D allows features that may have a small performance/space cost if they make the language a … Read more
What determines the success and popularity of a programming language for real-world software development is only partially related to the quality of the language itself. As a pure language, D arguably has many advantages over C++ and Java. At the very least it is a credible alternative as a pure language, all other things being … Read more