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On Monday, 20 May 2024 at 08:03:12 UTC, RazvanN wrote:
>Templates are quite cool and they do appeal the inner nerd, but the reality is that not so many people use templates. If you're not a library writer, chances are you'll stick to using normal functions.
The complexity of templates is probably more important (though I agree with your point). Maybe after years of using the language they will have uses here and there, but templates are not a positive when showing off the language. Same for ranges.
>After my talk, some people that were using C++ came to talk to me. They're biggest problem was they were having buffer overflows which corrupted memory that were not caught by their linters. They liked the idea of automatic bounds checks and the fact that you can incrementally transition to D, however, they were wondering how safe is D when you are not using the GC. They also mentioned that they considered using Rust, however, it's pretty much an overkill for their use case. I told them that for their use case they can simply manually allocate memory and then create an array which contains the size information. The compiler will then check every access to the array for out of bounds indexes, however, they will still need to manage the memory manually. All in all, they seemed willing to try D, however, we cannot since if they will actually do it.
D has a GC that is the source of many complaints, but it also has SafeRefCounted. Maybe I don't keep up with the C++ community, but I thought they were fans of RC, based on the repeated claims that you should seldom need to do manual memory management in C++. SafeRefCounted is part of Phobos so it's not like you're relying on a third-party package author to maintain it.