this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Programming
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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.
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 . :)