Sunday, February 11, 2007
“Great, just what I need … another D in programming.”
D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability.
D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It's multiparadigm: supporting imperative, object oriented, and template metaprogramming styles. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its look and feel is very close to C++'s. For a quick feature comparison, see this comparison of D with C, C++, C# and Java.
D looks to be
a very interesting language. Take the C/C++ syntax, remove header files
entirely (A Good Thing™) and use a Javaesque “import” statement, salt with
native string support (not the C/C++ halfbaked NUL
terminated character arrays, nor the Java string class with special
dispensation from the compiler), add in Pascal's nested functions, and LISP's
anonymous functions, bake in garbage collection and contract programming,
Haskel's lazy evaluation of parameters and you have D (with some other
stuff I've left out).
All that, and it's written by a guy who's implemented a compiler or two and there currently exist two implemented compilers, the native one and a frontend for GCC makes this a rather serious attempt at a new language.
I'm impressed.
The only complaint I have of the language is the lack of concurrency support at the langauge level. Ten years ago it might not have been much of a loss, but today, the trend towards multiple CPUs makes this almost unexcusable.
Still, it's an impressive language.
