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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I wish more mention of D would happen. It is compatible with C and C++ libraries and features GC without sacrificing the good things of C and C++. I always loved the idea of Rust and Go but they are nowhere near C or C++ where it matters to me. D fits the bill, otherwise I just use Python. I like being able to design software in my own way as opposed to being told how to do it.

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The truth is the Rust leadership did the hard work of building a community around the language, making high-quality tutorials and introductions to the language all before it stabilized for 1.0. Many developers claim to dislike "marketing", but Rust did its marketing/evangelism and D didn't.

From a purely technical standpoint, Rust's borrow checker is able to catch data races, while D has no such functionality (unless I'm not caught up), which is a huge advantage in today's world of multithreaded applications.

Even in single-threaded mode D isn't too safe. Safer than C, but unless you're using the GC it is still unsafe.

Same thing with Ada. If you're looking for a safer low-level language with a long track record of successful use by some major players, Ada is the natural first candidate.

But as someone else said, Rust has had way better marketing (and is newer, which probably catches some people as well.)

Are there any large non-DoD projects written in Ada that are still used?

I personally don't know any, but I guess avionics, trains and things like power plants might be candidates where one could look.

Automotive has unfortunately settled mostly on C and build a whole ecosystem around it (Autosar). With all that talk around self driving cars safer programming languages and tools would make a lot of sense.

Last time I took a look at D I was awed by how terrible it's documentation is.

I very much enjoy using D and want it to succeed but this statement along with finding "everyday uses" for things (e.g. using zeromq) are huge drawbacks to buying into it. I'll still advocate but it's not easy sometimes

I think three things attribute to a programming languages success or failure: tooling, documentation and standard library. Look at Go, great out of the box library, same with Python, but the tooling for Go isn't the greatest (debugger? a real IDE? etc) then you look at C#: tooling (Visual Studio, VS Code, debugger), documentation, and even out of the box the .NET Framework is a decent "standard library" with plenty included. If only D had at the very least a well dedicated IDE. I hope more people notice D so that the community around it builds solutions, it has a lot of great potential yet to be tapped, and plenty of groundwork has already been done with D.

I thought D still required a GC? Not that that's the end of the world, but with such strict requirements I'm surprised it would satisfy you.

> I thought D still required a GC?

Not strictly required. You can certainly disable it at the cost of more work (and understanding). Or live with it and reduce its impact as needed.

What do you mean by "they are nowhere near C or C++ where it matters to [you]"? Specifically with Rust (because I already know why Go isn't necessarily a good replacement for C or C++). I know very little about D, one of the few things I know is that it is compatible with C++, which is neat, but that's surely not a concern when talking about C.

As far as being able to write code in a paradigm I'm comfortable in as opposed to being forced into one when the purpose of a language is to replace C++ (which is what Rust and Go both were aimed at). As well as being forced where to put the opening bracket like in Go, which at first didn't bother me, but after a while it became a code smell of itself. There's plenty of talk about Go programmers copying and pasting code, which violates the DRY principle. I like having the option to use GC in D and still being able to compile my code. I even converted some C# code over to D that a project of mine heavily relied on and it compiles perfectly fine regardless of distro or OS I compile it from, granted it was very small / minimal code.

Me too, but although the community is great, lack of focus on how to go forward in memory management, runtime and deprecated packages, seems to keep hurting the language's appeal.

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