D also supports POSIX positional arguments: https://dlang.org/library/std/format/formatted_write.html
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This is only a smart part of the benchmarks I've run because I wanted to drive one point home within a limited space. I've run many tests on various data types and shapes, and Lomuto does better than Hoare on most. (E.g. its improvement on double is even larger than on integrals.)
Abstract: Over the years, a few programming paradigms have been successful enough to enter the casual vocabulary of software engineers: procedural, imperative, object-oriented, functional, generic, declarative. There's a B-list, too, that includes paradigms such as logic, constraint-oriented, and symbolic.
The point is, there aren't very many of them altogether. Easy to imagine, then, the immensely humbling pressure one must feel when stumbling upon a way to think about writing code that is at the same time explosively productive and firmly removed from any of the paradigms considered canon.
This talk shares early experience with Design by Introspection, a proposed programming paradigm that has enough demonstrable results to be worth sharing. The tenets of Design by Introspection are:
* The rule of optionality: Component primitives are almost entirely opt-in. A given component is required to implement only a modicum of primitives, and all others are optional. The component is free to implement any subset of the optional primitives.
* The rule of introspection: A component user employs introspection on the component to implement its own functionality using the primitives offered by the component.
* The rule of elastic composition: a component obtained by composing several other components offers capabilities in proportion with the capabilities offered by its individual components.
These rules, and how to use them to build powerful software, are the topic of this talk.
That said, just as a related aside, there's the Daniel Murphy's magicport program that translates real projects from C++ do D semiautomatically (Daniel used it to translate the D compiler itself; we recently committed to bootstrapping).
However, there were two concurrent developments. One is Martin Nowak and others did great work on improving D's existing garbage collector. The other trend is that it became increasingly clear that a category of users will always be weary of a GC, be it for the right or wrong reasons. So the better place to hit is to offer a great experience in D without requiring any garbage collection at all.
2. Mobile is an important area for a language like D. We don't have many experts on team to work on that, but we're looking. One thing I can do soon is to encourage ARM support, which right now works only experimentally and in a science project kind of way.
3. I want to make it possible to use a well-defined subset of the standard library without a GC. (The subset part is for legacy compatibility.)
Competition is good for all involved. Rust and C++ are the competitors closer to the same turf. I think we have a solid value proposition and several ways to enhance it and differentiate ourselves. Time will tell.
(EDIT sorry, submitted too soon) With regard to targeted users and uses, D is an ample language that could be used for a large range (heh) of applications. I want to make sure the core language and libraries offers a solid support on which various applications, frameworks, and libraries can build.
2. The store is a hashtable.
3. Multiple arguments are grouped in a tuple - no major complication.
4. Where memoization doesn't make sense you'll get a compile-time error because e.g. comparison for equality is't defined. At least most of the time :o).
5. The memory is thread-local.
6. memoize takes the name of the memoized argument and creates a distinct type for each memoized function.
TL;DR: business as usual