D Programming Language

By | November 23, 2011

What is D?

D is a general purpose systems and applications programming language. It is a high level language, but retains the ability to write high performance code and interface directly with the operating system API‘s and with hardware. D is well suited to writing medium to large scale million line programs with teams of developers. D is easy to learn, provides many capabilities to aid the programmer, and is well suited to aggressive compiler optimization technology. D Man

D is not a scripting language, nor an interpreted language. It doesn’t come with a VM, a religion, or an overriding philosophy. It’s a practical language for practical programmers who need to get the job done quickly, reliably, and leave behind maintainable, easy to understand code.

D is the culmination of decades of experience implementing compilers for many diverse languages, and attempting to construct large projects using those languages. D draws inspiration from those other languages (most especially C++) and tempers it with experience and real world practicality.

Why D?

Why, indeed. Who needs another programming language?

The software industry has come a long way since the C language was invented. Many new concepts were added to the language with C++, but backwards compatibility with C was maintained, including compatibility with nearly all the weaknesses of the original design. There have been many attempts to fix those weaknesses, but the compatibility issue frustrates it. Meanwhile, both C and C++ undergo a constant accretion of new features. These new features must be carefully fitted into the existing structure without requiring rewriting old code. The end result is very complicated – the C standard is nearly 500 pages, and the C++ standard is about 750 pages! C++ is a difficult and costly language to implement, resulting in implementation variations that make it frustrating to write fully portable C++ code.

C++ implements things like resizable arrays and string concatenation as part of the standard library, not as part of the core language. Not being part of the core language has several suboptimal consequences.

Can the power and capability of C++ be extracted, redesigned, and recast into a language that is simple, orthogonal, and practical? Can it all be put into a package that is easy for compiler writers to correctly implement, and which enables compilers to efficiently generate aggressively optimized code?

Modern compiler technology has progressed to the point where language features for the purpose of compensating for primitive compiler technology can be omitted. (An example of this would be the ‘register’ keyword in C, a more subtle example is the macro preprocessor in C.) We can rely on modern compiler optimization technology to not need language features necessary to get acceptable code quality out of primitive compilers.

Who D is For

  • Programmers who routinely use lint or similar code analysis tools to eliminate bugs before the code is even compiled.
  • People who compile with maximum warning levels turned on and who instruct the compiler to treat warnings as errors.
  • Programming managers who are forced to rely on programming style guidelines to avoid common C bugs.
  • Those who decide the promise of C++ object oriented programming is not fulfilled due to the complexity of it.
  • Programmers who enjoy the expressive power of C++ but are frustrated by the need to expend much effort explicitly managing memory and finding pointer bugs.
  • Projects that need built-in testing and verification.
  • Teams who write apps with a million lines of code in it.
  • Programmers who think the language should provide enough features to obviate the continual necessity to manipulate pointers directly.
  • Numerical programmers. D has many features to directly support features needed by numerics programmers, like extended floating point precision, core support for complex and imaginary floating types and defined behavior for NaN‘s and infinities. (These are added in the new C99 standard, but not in C++.)
  • Programmers who write half their application in scripting langauges like Ruby and Python, and the other half in C++ to speed up the bottlenecks. D has many of the productivity features of Ruby and Python, making it possible to write the entire app in one language.
  • D’s lexical analyzer and parser are totally independent of each other and of the semantic analyzer. This means it is easy to write simple tools to manipulate D source perfectly without having to build a full compiler. It also means that source code can be transmitted in tokenized form for specialized applications.

Who D is Not For

  • Realistically, nobody is going to convert million line C or C++ programs into D. Since D does not compile unmodified C/C++ source code, D is not for legacy apps. (However, D supports legacy C API’s very well. D can connect directly to any code that exposes a C interface.)
  • As a first programming language – Basic or Java is more suitable for beginners. D makes an excellent second language for intermediate to advanced programmers.
  • Language purists. D is a practical language, and each feature of it is evaluated in that light, rather than by an ideal. For example, D has constructs and semantics that virtually eliminate the need for pointers for ordinary tasks. But pointers are still there, because sometimes the rules need to be broken. Similarly, casts are still there for those times when the typing system needs to be overridden.

~source D-Programming-Language

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