These include:
1. bounds checked arrays (you can still use raw pointers instead if you like)
2. default initialization
3. static checks for escaping pointers
4. optional use of pure functions
5. transitive const and immutable qualifiers
6. ranges based on slices rather than pointer pairs
1. The use of garbage collection. If you accept GC there are many other languages you can use. If you don't want GC the only realistic option was C++. Rust doesn't rely on GC.
IIRC GC in D is optional in some way, but the story always felt murky to me and that always felt like a way of weaseling out of that problem - like if I actually started writing D I'd find all the libraries needed GC anyway.
2. The awkward standard library schism.
3. Small community compared to C++. I think it probably just didn't offer enough to overcome this, whereas Rust did. Rust also had the help of backing from a large organisation.
I don't recall anyone ever mentioning its improved safety. I had a look on Algolia back through HN and most praise is about metaprogramming or it being generally more modern and sane than C++. I couldn't find a single mention of anything to do with safety or anything on your list.
Whereas Rust shouts safety from the rooftops. Arguably too much!
D's selling only proposition was providing C++11 features in a point in time between C++98 and C++11 when the C++ committee struggled to get a new standard out of the door.
Once C++11 was out, D's sales pitch was moot, and whatever wind it had in it's sail was lost and never recovered again.
It's interesting to note that Rust, in spite of all odds and also it's community, managed to put together a far more compelling sales pitch than D.
D has a lot of very useful features. Memory safety features are just one aspect of it.
> The awkward standard library schism.
???
Don't underestimate the backing of a large and powerful organization.
Yes but people wanted a language where you can't use GC.
> ???
"Which standard library should I use?" is not a question most languages have:
https://stackoverflow.com/q/693672/265521
Surely... you were aware of this problem? Maybe I misunderstood the "???".
> Don't underestimate the backing of a large and powerful organization.
Yeah it definitely matters a lot. I don't think Go would have been remotely as successful as it has been without Google.
But also we shouldn't overstate it. It definitely helped Rust to have Mozilla, but Mozilla isn't nearly as large and powerful as Google. The fact that it is an excellent language with generally fantastic ergonomics and first-of-its-kind practical memory safety without GC... probably more important. (Of course you could argue it wouldn't have got to that point without Mozilla.)
There is no such question when using D2 either. It was only an issue with D1, which was discontinued almost 15 years ago and was irrelevant for longer.
What do you think of C and C++ coming with extensive guides for best practices and what features to not use? Even so, D comes with an @nogc attribute which won't let you use the GC. Ironically, people complain that @nogc actually does not allow use of the GC. You can also use the -betterC compiler switch to not use the GC.
Interestingly, Compile Time Function Execution works great with the GC, as one needn't have to do backflips to allocate some memory.
Mozilla is orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than the D Language Foundation.
I feel that this is a disingenuous point and that you know better than this.
For example, the poster child of C++'s "don't use this feature" cliche are exceptions, and it's origins are primarily in Google's C++ stye guide.
https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Exceptions
If you cross-reference your claims with what Google's rationale was, you will be forced to admit your remark misrepresents the whole point.
You do not need to read too far to realize Google's point is that they have a huge stack of legacy code that is not exception-safe and not expected to be refactored, and introducing exceptions would lead their legacy code to break in ways that is not easy to remediate.
So Google had to make a call, and they decided to add the caveat that if your code is expected to be invoked by exception-free code, it should not throw exceptions.
Taken from the guide:
> Because most existing C++ code at Google is not prepared to deal with exceptions, it is comparatively difficult to adopt new code that generates exceptions.
I wonder why you left this bit out.
If this is how you try to get D to shine, then you should know why it isn't.
Google's guide is not the only one. There are the Scott Meyers series "Effective C++" with things like "declare destructors virtual in polymorphic base classes". D's destructors in polymorphic are always virtual.
This brings up another issue with C++ - conflation of polymorphic structs with non-polymorphic structs. The former should always be passed by reference, the latter maybe or maybe not. What C++ should have done is what D does - structs are for aggregation, classes are for OOP. The fundamental differences are enforced.
How does one enforce not passing a polymorphic object by value in C++? Some googling of the topic results in variations on "don't do that".
Again, you know better than this. I don't know why you are making these claims, and it's very disappointing to see you make whole sequences of them.
There are no "built-in" arrays in C++. There's C-style arrays, which are there for compatibility with C, and then there's C++'s STL. Since C++'s inception, the recommendation is to use C++'s containers. In STL, there is std::array and std::vector. Which one you pick, it's up to your use case.
This isn't a gotcha. This is C++ 101.
They're built-in arrays. The C++11 n3290 specification calls them arrays in section 8.1. The use of "array" is used regularly elsewhere in the specification. They are built in to the language. There is no warning from clang compiling C++ code that these should not be used.
The trouble with C++ builtin arrays is they have no bounds checking and promptly decay to pointers at every opportunity. Despite the obsolete nature of them, people still use them. There's no switch to turn them off.
Where's the C++ guarantee that code doesn't use those builtin arrays?
Software never was a technical meritocracy.
There does not have to have been anything technically wrong with D for it to not have been widely adopted. I think HN doesn’t like that because it often means that there’s nothing obvious they can necessarily do to fix it
For me, it was missing presence in the IT news that did it. D might be great, but it makes no noise.
Rust or go had a lot of articles and blog posts going deep into specific posts, appearing at a regular rate. They tended to appear on e.g this hacker news, or reddit, etc... This caused a drip feed of tutoring, giving me a slow but steady feel for these languagee. There were people tirelessly correcting misinformation. There were non stop code examples of people doing stuff with the language, proving the language usable in all kind of situations.
Nginx had the guy translating the manual from russian. Ruby had the person with the weird poetic manuals. Rust had Steve Klabnic and others.
You need someone who is both a technical person and a communicator, being active on fora, doing advent calendars, blog posts, etc... Rust jumped in a hole where D could also fit, and D might be easyer than rust. I think the background interest in D exists, but has nothing to crystallize around.
Unfortunately that was already lost, Java/Kotlin, Go, C# and Swift are the platform holder darlings for safe languages with GC, being improved for low level programming on each release, many with feature that you may argue that were in D first, and Rust for everything else.
Microsoft recently announced first class support for writing drivers in Rust, while I am certain that NVidia might be supportive of future Rust support on CUDA, after they get their new Python cu tiles support going across the ecosystem.
Two examples out of many others.
Language is great systems programming language, what is missing is the rest of the owl.
Why does Rust sometimes require program redesigns? Because these programs are flawed at some fundamental level. D lacks the most important and hardest kind of safety and that is reference safety - curiously C++ profiles also lacks any solution to that problem. A significant amount of production C++ code is riddled with UB and will never be made safe by repainting it and bounds checking.
Claiming that not being forced to fix something fundamentally broken is an advantage when talking about safety doesn't make you look like a particularly serious advocate for the topic.
I'm familiar with borrow checkers, as I wrote one for D.
Not following the rules of the borrow checker does not mean the program is flawed or incorrect. It just means the borrow checker is unable to prove it correct.
> D lacks the most important and hardest kind of safety and that is reference safety
I look at compilations of programming safety errors in shipped code now and then. Far and away the #1 bug is out-of-bounds array access. D has solved that problem.
BTW, if you use the optional GC in D, the program will be memory safe. No borrow checker needed.
Do you have good data on that? Looking at the curl and Chromium reports they show that use-after-free is their most recurring and problematic issue.
I'm sure you are aware, but I want to mention this here for other readers. Reference safety extends to things like iterators and slices in C++.
> Not following the rules of the borrow checker does not mean the program is flawed or incorrect.
At a scale of 100k+ LoC every single measured program has been shown to be flawed because of it.
Edit: I just googled "causes of memory safety bugs in C++". Number 1 answer: "Buffer Overflows/Out-of-Bounds Access"
"Undefined behavior in C/C++ code leads to security flaws like buffer overflows" https://www.trust-in-soft.com/resources/blogs/memory-safety-...
"Some common types of memory safety bugs include: Buffer overflows" https://www.code-intelligence.com/blog/memory_safety_corrupt...
"Memory Safety Vulnerabilities 3.1. Buffer overflow vulnerabilities We’ll start our discussion of vulnerabilities with one of the most common types of errors — buffer overflow (also called buffer overrun) vulnerabilities. Buffer overflow vulnerabilities are a particular risk in C, and since C is an especially widely used systems programming language, you might not be surprised to hear that buffer overflows are one of the most pervasive kind of implementation flaws around." https://textbook.cs161.org/memory-safety/vulnerabilities.htm...
Temporal safety is usually also much harder to reason about for humans, since it requires more context.
Based on their slides [2]. I was wrongly informed one does need to do some light annotation in function signatures and struct definitions for anything ABI relevant. Based on their slides:
Ptrdist and Olden benchmark suites
- LOC changes: 2.7% (0.2% used unsafe constructs) Much lower than prior approaches
- Compile-time overhead: 11%
- Code-size (text section) overhead: 9.1% (ranged -1.4% to 38%)
- Run-time overhead: 5.1% (ranged -1% to 29%)
Measurement on iOS
- 0-8% binary size increase per project
- No measurable performance or power impact on boot, app launch
- Minor overall performance impact on audio decoding/encoding (1%)
[1] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/BoundsSafety.html
[2] https://llvm.org/devmtg/2023-05/slides/TechnicalTalks-May11/...
Simply not true, and this stance is one of the reasons we have people talking about Rust sect.
No. Programs that pass borrow checking are a strict subset of programs that are correct with respect to memory allocation; an infinite number of correct programs do not pass it. The borrow checker is a good idea, but it's (necessarily) incomplete.
Your claim is like saying that a program that uses any kind of dynamic memory allocation at all is fundamentally broken.
That's a very strong statement. How do you support it with arguments?