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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

I use D to interface with C code and C APIs. Started using it for that purpose in June 2013 and haven't looked back. Used Rust and Go first, did not like either, and have been happy using D ever since. Over time the interoperability with C has gotten even stronger - to the point that you don't need to write bindings for the most part, and you can even directly compile C code as part of your project.

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Are you saying you tried rust in 2013 and found it unsuitable? I think it was a pretty different thing back then. Though obviously that doesn’t mean D isn’t a great choice.

I quit using Rust in 2013 due to the learning curve. There's just no way I could have asked anyone else to use it.

Keep in mind that Rust 1.0 was released in early 2015, and it's not like they were making major changes right up to that release date. I haven't followed it recently, but I doubt it was meaningfully different from the 1.0 release in terms of learning curve.

Rust was still changing quite a lot in 2013. It sounds like you used it back when it had a garbage collector, baked-in green threads, and "~" and "@" sigils everywhere. Rust 1.0 may as well be a completely different language.

Here's a blog post from the same year that proposed removing the garbage collector.

https://pcwalton.github.io/_posts/2013-06-02-removing-garbag...

There actually were quite a lot of changes. I remember using it in 2014, and then 1.0 in 2015, and found 1.0 to be much more approachable.

Also, since 2018 with non-lexical lifetimes and some nice error handling improvements, Rust now tends to be more friendly/ergonomic than 1.0.

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