Dear D Community,
is it reasonable to learn D?
I've found a lot of good points for D but I've found a lot of negative points too. I believe that I needn't to list all the point for D but I want to give a few examples against learning D I've read in some German and English boards:

	- The D compiler has only bad code optimization
	- There are no maintained GUI libraries
	- The development of the compiler is very slow
	- Only a small community
		=> no real German community

So I ask you - Is it reasonable to learn D?
I'm looking forward to your answers.

Greetings Fabian

PS: If you want to contact me you are allowed to write an Email to me.
contact-fab@freemail.de

On 06/07/2011 01:47 PM, Fabian wrote:
> Dear D Community,
> is it reasonable to learn D?
> I've found a lot of good points for D but I've found a lot of negative
> points too. I believe that I needn't to list all the point for D but I
> want to give a few examples against learning D I've read in some German
> and English boards:
>
> - The D compiler has only bad code optimization
> - There are no maintained GUI libraries
> - The development of the compiler is very slow
> - Only a small community
> => no real German community
>
> So I ask you - Is it reasonable to learn D?
> I'm looking forward to your answers.
>
> Greetings Fabian
>
> PS: If you want to contact me you are allowed to write an Email to me.
> contact-fab@freemail.de

I think your question is highly subjective. D is still a young language, which I think accounts for all of the negative feedback you've listed.

Fabian wrote:
> Dear D Community,
> is it reasonable to learn D?
> I've found a lot of good points for D but I've found a lot of negative
> points too. I believe that I needn't to list all the point for D but I
> want to give a few examples against learning D I've read in some German
> and English boards:
>
>  - The D compiler has only bad code optimization

It is not very bad, but does not match the sophisticatedness of modern C++ compilers. I think the optimizations on integer arithmetics are quite okay, but unfortunately the compiler cannot create floating point register variables.

You can always resort to inline assembly/link in C or C++ if some part of your code is very performance-critical.

D code can already outperform C++ code on similar tasks if you make smart use of D
features. (without making your code ugly or unmaintainable).
But it is true that this could be improved. (To the point where a D compiler could
make MORE optimizations than C++, because it has immutable and pure).

>  - There are no maintained GUI libraries

I don't know about this but I think QtD and DWT are still being maintained?
Also, D is fully binary compatible with C/(C++) You can also do your GUI
programming in C or C++ and use D for some program logic until the situation improves.

>  - The development of the compiler is very slow

Have a look at the last changelog. The development is not lightning fast but quite
steady.
Also keep in mind that there is no big company behind D, all the compiler
development is basically volunteering work.

>  - Only a small community
>   => no real German community

The community does not grow if people stay away because it is small. ;) *I* speak German btw.

>
> So I ask you - Is it reasonable to learn D?
> I'm looking forward to your answers.
>
> Greetings Fabian
>
> PS: If you want to contact me you are allowed to write an Email to me. contact-fab@freemail.de

I think it is very reasonable. But it depends on what you want to use it for.
There are already companies out there that use D.
If you have some time to spend, it is certainly valuable. D has some very nice
design decisions.
The _language_ itself is imho superior to the alternatives. Where D is arguably
somewhat lacking (as you have already figured out.) is support/native libraries.
It does make up some of that by being easily linkable with C libraries, but you
often will have to write the bindings yourself.
But again that does not get better if people don't learn D because of lack of
support or native libraries.

There are also some upsides to a language being less mature: You can still submit patches and get some of your very own code into the reference compiler implementation! ;)


Timon

> I think your question is highly subjective. D is still a young language,
> which I think accounts for all of the negative feedback you've listed.

I believe D isn't so young anymore. Version 1.0 was released 2007 and I believe 4 years are long enough to bring out some maintained GUI libraries.
If someone says D doesn't aim at GUI development I must say that's not true because D is designed as a new object orientated language basing on C. And as a consequence of that D should support all the areas of application which C already supports.

I hope you can understand my bad English. Connecting to that (my bad English) I have another stupid question: What does "think accounts" mean?

Greetings Fabian

> The community does not grow if people stay away because it is small.

Thank you for your answer. - You've got a big point!

> I don't know about this but I think QtD and DWT are still being
> maintained?

I can't see any changes on this web page: http://www.dsource.org/projects/dwt/wiki

That's too bad :-(

How do you use D? What are your fields of application?

Greetings Fabian

PS: Are you a native German speaker?

On 06/07/2011 01:55 PM, Fabian wrote:
>> D is still a young language,
>> which I think accounts for all of the negative feedback you've listed.

> What does "think accounts" mean?

I rephrase with apology:

<rephrase>D is still a young language. I think that fact accounts for all of the negative feedback that you've listed.</rephrase>

Ali

On 07/06/2011 20:47, Fabian wrote:
> Dear D Community,
> is it reasonable to learn D?
> I've found a lot of good points for D but I've found a lot of negative
> points too. I believe that I needn't to list all the point for D but I
> want to give a few examples against learning D I've read in some German
> and English boards:
>
> - The D compiler has only bad code optimization

You must be thinking of dmd! There's also ldc and gdc using the llvm and gcc backends respectively, they're capable of producing code roughly as fast as the equivalent C/C++ applications.

> - There are no maintained GUI libraries

I don't know what the state of GUI libraries is in D, but I have used both GtkD and QtD without problem before now. There are also a couple of others which have recently had updates.

> - The development of the compiler is very slow

Very slow? dmd gets a new release about once a month with a huge of bug fixes - http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/changelog.html - scroll down the page, there's a lot in each release. And, since the move the github, there's even more going on - https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/commits/master at least a few commits a day, by an increasing number of developers. The speed of development has increased a lot in the past months.

> - Only a small community

Well that's a catch-22 - if people chose not to learn it because it has a small community, the community will stay small! There's an increasing amount of awareness and adoption of D, particularly since Andrei released his book "The D Programming Language".

> => no real German community

You'd be surprised - while I don't think there's a dedicated German forum for D (perhaps you'd like to start one?) there are a lot of people from Germany using D - about 10% of the people in D's IRC channel on freenode are German, and there's probably more using the newsgroups. I think a lot of people chose to use English anyway as it's the language most of the people on the forums speak.

> So I ask you - Is it reasonable to learn D?

Definitely yes! Even if you don't end up using it as a primary language, it's a fantastic language with lots of great ideas - I find myself missing features from D when I use other languages.

> I'm looking forward to your answers.
>
> Greetings Fabian
>
> PS: If you want to contact me you are allowed to write an Email to me.
> contact-fab@freemail.de

-- 
Robert
http://octarineparrot.com/

On 2011-06-07 14:02, Fabian wrote:
> > The community does not grow if people stay away because it is small.
> 
> Thank you for your answer. - You've got a big point!
> 
> > I don't know about this but I think QtD and DWT are still being maintained?
> 
> I can't see any changes on this web page: http://www.dsource.org/projects/dwt/wiki
> 
> That's too bad :-(

http://hg.dsource.org/projects/dwt2

DWT was recently ported to D2. Also, QtD is definitely under active development. But I'm sure that there's still plenty of work to be done.

- Jonathan M Davis

Am 07.06.2011, 23:02 Uhr, schrieb Fabian <contact-fab@freenet.de>:
> I can't see any changes on this web page: http://www.dsource.org/projects/dwt/wiki

That doesn't mean anything.
Development sometimes takes place behind the scenes or in forks at github or bitbucket.

Fabian wrote:
> > The community does not grow if people stay away because it is small.
>
> Thank you for your answer. - You've got a big point!
>
> > I don't know about this but I think QtD and DWT are still being maintained?
>
> I can't see any changes on this web page: http://www.dsource.org/projects/dwt/wiki
>
> That's too bad :-(
>
> How do you use D? What are your fields of application?

I am quite new to D myself. I have been using D mostly for solving small
algorithmic problems.
I'd like to improve that situation though, I will definitely use D for some
small/medium project soon.
What are you looking for? Do you have any specific use in mind?

>
> Greetings Fabian
>
> PS: Are you a native German speaker?

Yes.


Timon