I will be presenting D as a time-saving tool at C++Now:

  http://cppnow.org/

I have to say it took me a very long time to come up with the title and the abstract. How could I sell D to C++ experts? Luckily, I asked Manu and among a long list of ideas he said "it's about saving time" and "time is money". How can you argue with that? ;)

Do you agree or disagree that D brings competitive advantage? Please let me know.

Are you attending the conference?

Ali

On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 06:08:16 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> I will be presenting D as a time-saving tool at C++Now:
>
>   http://cppnow.org/
>
> I have to say it took me a very long time to come up with the title and the abstract. How could I sell D to C++ experts? Luckily, I asked Manu and among a long list of ideas he said "it's about saving time" and "time is money". How can you argue with that? ;)
>
> Do you agree or disagree that D brings competitive advantage? Please let me know.
>
> Are you attending the conference?
>
> Ali

D can't compete with C++ until it gets proper dynamic library support on all platforms. As far as I understand there're still problems on Windows.

On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 06:08:16 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> I will be presenting D as a time-saving tool at C++Now:
>
>   http://cppnow.org/

Looks like C++Now has two keynotes. One keynote on D and one keynote on Rust. Maybe they should change their name. ;)

On 2017-04-11 08:50, FreeSlave wrote:

> D can't compete with C++ until it gets proper dynamic library support on
> all platforms. As far as I understand there're still problems on Windows.

And no official support on macOS.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 06:08:16 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> I will be presenting D as a time-saving tool at C++Now:
>
>   http://cppnow.org/
>
> I have to say it took me a very long time to come up with the title and the abstract. How could I sell D to C++ experts? Luckily, I asked Manu and among a long list of ideas he said "it's about saving time" and "time is money". How can you argue with that? ;)
>
> Do you agree or disagree that D brings competitive advantage? Please let me know.

Safety (bounds checking, @safe, memory safety) is huge for debugging. You can probably steal a lot from Walters DConf Talk.

Compilation time, because a quick iteration of edit-compile-test is significant for productivity and really underrated.

C++ interop, so you can migrate from C++ to D in small steps and without building a C API bridge.

Little things C++ lacks because it is too old: A package manager, a standard string type.

Meta programming naturally, but "static if" might trail into discussions about concepts, so it is a little bit dangerous?

On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 06:08:16 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> Do you agree or disagree that D brings competitive advantage? Please let me know.

Agree.  There are different tradeoffs, obviously, and it won't suit all use-cases, but the ability to iterate fast through highly performant and provably correct code is very striking.

If you manage your compile-time generics well -- i.e. using them to generalize for use cases that you definitely have, rather than premature generalization -- you can get a lot of power out of this that really helps with _effective_ code re-use.

Compile time checks, contracts, and easy built-in unittests all make a big help in being able to make changes to code while maintaining confidence in its correctness -- again, making it faster to get things done.

And the simple clarity of the syntax really helps compared to, say, C++.  It's much easier to write and much easier to read and understand.  So, once again, it's easier to move fast.


> Are you attending the conference?

Not C++Now, I'm afraid.  But will we see you at DConf? :-)

On 04/11/2017 08:50 AM, FreeSlave wrote:
> D can't compete with C++ until it gets proper dynamic library support on all platforms. As far as I understand there're still problems on Windows.

Go fix it ;).

Yes, we still need to make `export` work to replace `dllimport`/`dllexport`, then we can address the couple of low-level linking and TLS issues. Benjamin Thaut works on this and has a workable solution [¹].

Once this is done, DLL support should be on par with OSX/Linux/FreeBSD.

Depending on what you want to do, you can already use D DLL's now, but atm. each DLL comes with it's own copy of the standard library, so different DLLs cannot talk to each other (see [²]).

As with any ambitious project, we always want to do more than we have resources for, so things tend to not move as fast as everybody wants them to.

-Martin

[¹]: [pending PR
dlang/DIPs#57](https://github.com/MartinNowak/DIPs/blob/fbad186cf9ac8dce335344e64d3b1d880bb750c0/DIPs/archive/DIP45.md)
[²]: [Issue 7020  – Exception thrown across DLL is not
caught.](https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7020)

On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 09:35:39 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> And the simple clarity of the syntax really helps compared to, say, C++.  It's much easier to write and much easier to read and understand.  So, once again, it's easier to move fast.

As a D beginner I have to say that this one was very visible for me.
I´m able to look at any D project read it and undertand it with ease.
Very few times I was able to do it that easy looking on c++ sources.

On Monday, April 10, 2017 23:08:16 Ali Çehreli via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> I will be presenting D as a time-saving tool at C++Now:
>
>    http://cppnow.org/
>
> I have to say it took me a very long time to come up with the title and the abstract. How could I sell D to C++ experts? Luckily, I asked Manu and among a long list of ideas he said "it's about saving time" and "time is money". How can you argue with that? ;)
>
> Do you agree or disagree that D brings competitive advantage? Please let me know.

They may yet make it into C++ in some form or another, but the lack of ranges in C++ is one of the things that I find really frustrating when I doing stuff for work. In particular, it's incredibly quick and easy to write parsing code for stuff in D with Phobos, whereas it takes a lot more time and effort to write it in C++. But just in general, I find that putting stuff together in D is faster than using C++. C++ is very powerful, but it's also quite clunky.

- Jonathan M Davis

On 04/11/2017 02:35 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> will we see you at DConf? :-)

Yes. I'm looking forward to it. :)

Ali