The Delightful D Programming Language

D versus C# and C++

I became a D enthusiast yesterday, when I learned how much better it is than C++, and I have been studying D for two days straight out of sheer love. Oh, it's not perfect, but compared to C++? No contest. Ditto for Java. C# was my language of choice as of 3 days ago, but today I think it has moved down a rank.

Not having used D for any serious work yet, I could be mistaken. But D has an answer to every major criticism commonly raised against C++, from compilation time, to poor type safety, to the headache of maintaining header files, to slow compilation. D isn't just an evolutionary improvement, it has innovations that don't exist in any of the world's popular languages*:

• It is said to have one of the world's fastest compilers
• You can use try/catch/finally and RAII, but scope(exit) makes exception-safe code easier to read and write
• You can define closures that the compiler can inline (do any C++11 compilers do that? I'm not sure, I'm stuck on Visual C++ 2008 due to a need to support Windows CE)
• Garbage Collection is standard but optional, so you can write programs with low-latency guarantees by avoiding GC allocations (but how to manage memory instead? I suspect one could use alias this to make smart pointers a la C++?)
• Slices and ranges, a collection access mechanism that is far safer than C++ iterators and also far more convenient, no need to repeat yourself as in lower_bound(blobCollection.begin(), blobCollection.end(), blob)
• Generics are more flexible than in C++ and don't produce pages of error messages
• Compile-time metaprogramming that vastly outclasses C++ (and obviously C# too)
• Compile-time reflection which (I hope, but can't confirm) one could use to build a run-time reflection system if one wanted
• A well-designed, multi-paradigm approach to concurrency with interesting features for both shared-memory and message-passing architectures
• Built-in support for unit tests
• Array-wise expressions, e.g. a[] = (b[] + c[]) / 2  (MATLAB does this more tersely, but among general-purpose languages this kind of feature is rare)
• Superior floating-point features (e.g. nextUp()/nextDown()/ulp(), hex floats, control of hardware exceptions)

* (Other less-popular languages have some of these features, but certainly not all of them)

And since D is so similar to C++ and C#, you wouldn't have to spend a lot of time learning it, so why not? Plus, it shouldn't be that hard to port small programs and libraries from C++.

Admittedly, I'm not happy with everything. They are still catering to the C crowd, so you still have to fill your "switch" statements with "breaks", the "static" keyword is confusingly overused, lambdas require braces and a "return" statement (c.f. C#'s quick x -> x+1 syntax), all functions and try/catches requires braces, pass-by-reference is implicit at the call site, the operator precedence of (&, |, ^) is foolish, there's no pattern matching or algebraic data types (but at least there are tuples), if statements are not expressions... still, what D offers is too good to pass up.

But of course, while the D language is clearly terrific, and the standard library has apparently matured, the surrounding tools might not be so good: IDEs, support for smartphone platforms, etc. The only IDE I tried, Visual D (IDE plugin for Visual Studio) works pretty well, including debugging which seems to work as well as the Visual C++ debugger, and which can step into the standard library (fun!). However, Code Completion doesn't work very well yet.

Compared to C#, D is better in most areas but seems weak when it comes to dynamic linking and reflection. For example, an IDE written in .NET or Java could easily have a plug-in system, but I'm not so sure about D. .NET also offers runtime code generation while D does not. However, a research compiler exists to compile D to .NET code. Given that C++/CLI already compiles to .NET (C++/CLI), perhaps someday one will be able use D equally well for managed and native code (with a small performance hit in managed land, of course.)

Interoperability with C/C++ and .NET are pretty decent. D is supposed to interoperate with C++ functions and singly-inherited classes via extern (C++) and C++ name mangling (but which compiler's name mangling?), while you can easily create COM interfaces callable from .NET and other languages.

Still don't know D? Go forth and learn it! Note: okay, to be honest the documentation isn't that great. It really helps to read The D Programming Language.