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digitalmars.D - About D and a gratitude

reply Matheus <m mail.com> writes:
First of all sorry my English, second and if that matters to 
anyone, I decided to open this thread to show my gratitude toward 
those who spend their time to help this language.

I've been using D for awhile and I decided to do this, because 
other day I was looking to understand more about Front-End vs 
Back-End (In Compilers).

I had a little grasp about this matter, but I wanted a correct 
answer and a simple search lead me to this: 
https://wiki.dlang.org/DMD_Source_Guide

While my question was solved I stop for a minute to contemplate 
this document and all the time/work someone put on it.

Another case is this: https://dlang.org/spec/spec.html - look all 
the effort.

While I'm talking about documents... there are many tools around 
too.

Talking about the language right now it attend my needs. I'm C 
programmer who never got in to C++, I just couldn't stand that 
language. And a few years ago I was looking around and I found D, 
which I appreciated from the beginning.

One thing that I liked at first was the fact that It has a 
built-in GC. While I see some people bashing it. I never had big 
problems even when writing games.

It's a raining Saturday morning where I live and took this time 
to show the community some gratitude.

Thanks,

Matheus.
Mar 02 2019
next sibling parent reply =?UTF-8?Q?Ali_=c3=87ehreli?= <acehreli yahoo.com> writes:
Thank you for writing this. It's always the negative experiences that 
move people to the keyboard.

On 03/02/2019 05:11 AM, Matheus wrote:


 show my gratitude toward those who spend
 their time to help this language.


Same here. I'm aware of the many great people working for me. Thank you! :)


 It has a built-in GC.
 While I see some people bashing it. I never had big problems even when
 writing games.


Same here. The GC has helped me so far.


 It's a raining Saturday morning where I live


Same here. :)

Ali
Mar 02 2019
parent Greatsam4sure <greatsam4sure gmail.com> writes:
On Saturday, 2 March 2019 at 22:10:52 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:

 Thank you for writing this. It's always the negative 
 experiences that move people to the keyboard.

 On 03/02/2019 05:11 AM, Matheus wrote:


 show my gratitude toward those who spend
 their time to help this language.


 Same here. I'm aware of the many great people working for me. 
 Thank you! :)


 It has a built-in GC.
 While I see some people bashing it. I never had big problems


 even when

 writing games.


 Same here. The GC has helped me so far.


 It's a raining Saturday morning where I live


 Same here. :)

 Ali


Dlang is a joy and a love to work with. Thanks to the team behind 
it. May your dreams for dlang become a reality and dlang grow to 
be number one language of choice for all
Mar 05 2019
prev sibling parent reply Ecstatic Coder <ecstatic.coder gmail.com> writes:
On Saturday, 2 March 2019 at 13:11:17 UTC, Matheus wrote:

 First of all sorry my English, second and if that matters to 
 anyone, I decided to open this thread to show my gratitude 
 toward those who spend their time to help this language.


+1 :)


 One thing that I liked at first was the fact that It has a 
 built-in GC. While I see some people bashing it. I never had 
 big problems even when writing games.


I think that those who bash D's GC are mostly those who would 
like to use D as an alternative to C and C++, while in those very 
few cases where C and C++ still remain the most obvious 
solutions, like OS/embedded/game-engine development, only the 
lack of a GC can **completely** remove the **risk** of a GC 
application freeze.

But for those who like me use D only as an alternative to 
scripting languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, etc, D's GC has 
never been a problem, but a blessing.

The only improvement I would be glad to see in D's GC is that it 


https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/26/feature-preview-incremental-garbage-collection/

But very honestly, for my personal file processing scripts, as 
far as I remember this has never been a problem.

So I'm also happy to have the opportunity to use D for almost all 
my file scripting needs, as in this domain I can assure you that 
D is by far one of the best alternative out there :)
Mar 08 2019
parent reply "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh quickfur.ath.cx> writes:
On Fri, Mar 08, 2019 at 06:21:51PM +0000, Ecstatic Coder via Digitalmars-d
wrote:

 On Saturday, 2 March 2019 at 13:11:17 UTC, Matheus wrote:


[...]

 One thing that I liked at first was the fact that It has a built-in
 GC.  While I see some people bashing it. I never had big problems
 even when writing games.


 
 I think that those who bash D's GC are mostly those who would like to
 use D as an alternative to C and C++, while in those very few cases
 where C and C++ still remain the most obvious solutions, like
 OS/embedded/game-engine development, only the lack of a GC can
 **completely** remove the **risk** of a GC application freeze.
 
 But for those who like me use D only as an alternative to scripting
 languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, etc, D's GC has never been a
 problem, but a blessing.


I come mostly from the C/C++ camp, and while I do sometimes write short
utilities in D that could be done with a Perl (or other scripting
language) script, my main focus is C/C++-style applications.  Yet I find
the GC to be a big blessing, rather than the curse some people seem to
think it is.  It has significantly improved my productivity, eliminated
an entire class of bugs, improved my APIs, improved the kind of
algorithms I could write (by not making every non-trivial algorithm a
monumental exercise in tight-rope balancing between memory management,
algorithmic needs, more memory management, resource usage, memory
management, and yet more memory management, that's the staple of C/C++
code of equivalent functionality), and given me the ability to focus on
and make progress in the problem domain rather than micro-managing
memory every other minute of writing code.

Even with the suboptimal GC that D has today, performance has rarely
been a major problem.  When it becomes a problem, there are ways of
mitigating it that doesn't involve rewriting entire APIs -- the kind of
thing you end up doing in C/C++ when you need to change how you manage
memory -- because memory management in C/C++ permeates every aspect of
your code, and it's almost impossible not to think about memory
management every other minute you write code, and it's practically
impossible not to have memory management considerations clutter all over
your APIs even if the code logically speaking has nothing to do with
memory management. It gets into your face, into your hair, and under
your skin, and even if you're a hero-cowboy coder who can navigate this
complex mess all it takes is ONE slip-up, and you have a memory leak,
segfault, or security hole in your hands. So much effort is spent on
memory management when writing C/C++ code, yet it all comes crashing
down like a tower of cards at the slightest provocation. It's totally
incommensurate, esp. if you're trying to make progress in the lousy
problem domain rather than babysitting memory management issues all day
long.

Give me a GC any day, seriously.

And if you ever need to, malloc/free is just a function call away in D,
for those times when you actually *need* to take hold of the reins.
(Unlike Java that coddles you so much it won't allow you to reach under
the hood for malloc, even when it becomes a necessity.)  There's a time
and place for this, but in general, I say gimme the GC so that I don't
have to debug memory leakage in a linked-list for the 1000th time in my
career, or track down an obscure untraceable dangling pointer bug for
the 500th time in my lifetime that's far too short to squander on such
needless annoyances.


[...]

 So I'm also happy to have the opportunity to use D for almost all my file
 scripting needs, as in this domain I can assure you that D is by far one of
 the best alternative out there :)


For me, D straddles that delicate (and very difficult!) balance between
being powerful enough for complex, large-scale applications, performant
enough for intensive computations, and simple enough to meet any one-off
scripting needs that might arise.  Most languages can only handle one of
the above; a few can handle two.  But I've yet to find one that can
master all three like D does.  These days I'm finding less and less need
for scripting languages and what-not.  D trumps them all, and comes with
the bonus that should that "one-off script" evolve into something more
than just a script, the code just fits itself into a more structured,
larger-scale design naturally.  I never have to worry about "rewriting
that hackish Perl script into a better-designed C++ program"; I just
write the script in D and then it becomes a full-fledged program as time
goes.  Marvelous.


T

-- 
Computers aren't intelligent; they only think they are.
Mar 08 2019
parent Ecstatic Coder <ecstatic.coder gmail.com> writes:
 For me, D straddles that delicate (and very difficult!) balance 
 between being powerful enough for complex, large-scale 
 applications, performant enough for intensive computations, and 
 simple enough to meet any one-off scripting needs that might 
 arise.  Most languages can only handle one of the above; a few 
 can handle two.  But I've yet to find one that can master all 
 three like D does.  These days I'm finding less and less need 
 for scripting languages and what-not.  D trumps them all, and 
 comes with the bonus that should that "one-off script" evolve 
 into something more than just a script, the code just fits 
 itself into a more structured, larger-scale design naturally.  
 I never have to worry about "rewriting that hackish Perl script 
 into a better-designed C++ program"; I just write the script in 
 D and then it becomes a full-fledged program as time goes.  
 Marvelous.


Apart from Crystal, I can't think of any other strongly-typed 
language that I've ever used which can provide this level of type 
safety and execution performance, while still preserving the 
expressiveness and productivity of a scripting language.

And I'm really fond of the simple and unified way in which 
strings, arrays and maps are managed in D (null initialization, 
~= appending operator, slices, etc). Brilliant !!!
Mar 10 2019