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8jy89hui | 3 years ago

It has taken huge amounts of work to get the Rust ecosystem to where it is. Even still, it has huge regions where it is immature. Is anyone in the D community able to talk about how mature the ecosystem is?

I had always assumed (perhaps naively) that not many people used D and that it was a bit esoteric…? Not to offend anyone. Kind of like F.

Should developers be investing time into learning D?

discuss

ttkciar|3 years ago

D has been around for 21 years. It has had a compiler in the gcc project (gdc) for four years. It debugs easily enough under gdb. Several editors support D syntax (including geany and vscode). It has quite a few libraries (though its interoperability with C libraries has muted native D library development somewhat), centralized at https://code.dlang.org/

Are there specific parts of the ecosystem you worry about not being mature?

As for it being a bit esoteric, yes, it's not a very widely known language, though I'm not sure why. I fell in love with it in 2018, and it has thoroughly spoiled me for writing C.

vlovich123|3 years ago

Maturity in a systems programming sense is different. Rust had a lot of effort pored (and still going) into the nostd variant to be used in bare metal applications like microcontrollers and kernels. Does D have that same level of formalism?

On a more serious note, I’m skeptical D would take. It seems like Rust has captured mind share and already has ongoing substantial work integrating it into the kernel (+ it’s the first and only non C language in kernel mainline). Given that context, I don’t see the motivation that works spur a similar level of support from kernel maintainers.

Conscat|3 years ago

One big issue with D compared to Rust for performance-oriented code is the lack of move semantics. Rust and C++ idiomatically almost never rely on copy-on-write, whereas D so far has a lot of it. I'm not sure how much this matters for kernel modules, but I imagine that it is something users would consider. I had seen some proposals for move semantics in D, so for all I know this is under works right now.