This article was just posted in /r/programming showcasing Rust as a web app language:

https://stu2b50.dev/posts/rust-is-surpris76171

Looking at it, I think D's arsd.cgi library is more expressive, but nobody will ever know because nobody is posting stories in /r/programming showcasing D.

D is ready for the big time, but I'm hard-pressed to find people who know it exists. Meanwhile, less powerful languages with less developed ecosystems (like Rust) are taking off, mainly IMO due to evangelism.

Later today (when I'm on my laptop) I'm going to hunt around on the D blog for some choice gems to post in /r/programming. If anyone has any to suggest, or would like to write something similar to that Rust article, links would be appreciated.

UPDATE: Per aldacron's suggestions, I'm mostly dropping this, though still intend to write up an article about my experiences with arsd.cgi and will post that.

New D programming book.

D programming language or DLang for Python programmers: rapid software development of high performance software and a reliable software technology. “There is no best programming language”, they say. There is, for most applications it is D.

The book starts from a comparison of D to Python. Then it explains D starting from simple features (types, variables, functions, expressions, statements) up to advanced ones (object oriented programming, templates, mixins, contract programming, overloading of operators, etc.) Then follows an advice for good programs and introduction to several libraries: the standard library Phobos (ranges, arrays, functional programming, tuples, the variant types, files, etc.) and several other important libraries including some libraries written by the author. Through these libraries D supports asynchronous programming, multithreaded programming, dependency injection (one particular “ideologically correct” flavor of which is introduced in details), etc. This book doesn’t just teach you D syntax, it gives you some principles to program in D in the right way. It is also considered how to create an object oriented wrapper over a C library. The book contains the articles “How to Make Your Programs Run Hundreds to Thousands Times Faster Without Giving up Reliability and Ease of Programming” and “What would be my choice of programming language if I was ordered to write a nuclear weapon control system?” The book ends with an advice on which D compiler to use.

This book makes you a D programmer. D is a very unusually good programming language for startups, academics, programming hobbyists, open source developers, big and small companies who decided to improve their efficiency and effectivity, electronics companies, game developers, system programmers, military, industry, supercomputers and mainframes. D can be used for desktop, Web development, electronics, smartphones, servers, mathematics, robots, games, GPU and AI, and even for writing an OS. If you are a programming teacher, your service would be greatly improved by starting to teach D. If you belong to any of these categories (and probably many more), don’t miss this great opportunity to learn D! And D is fast and low electricity consuming (green). D is the second choice for such kinds of projects after Rust (and no, it is not Ada).

D is such an incredible language but barely anyone uses it or even knows about it. Why? I want D to do well but I feel as though I'm missing something

Hello! I'm the guy who gave that talk at DConf about the mirror game. That game is finally out today on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2290770/The_Art_of_Reflection/

The D community has been a huge support throughout development, thank you everyone for the help, support, libraries, and language that I've built upon to make this thing.

There's a demo if you want to test it out. Happy to answer any questions, how it was using the D for the game, technical details etc. I've been in a hole working on this game for the last five years, so getting to talk about all the details is fun :)

Hello! I'm Lewis, a solo developer from Vancouver. I've been working on a game and the supporting engine in D for ~4 years now. The game is The Art of Reflection, there's a demo if you want to check it out. It's kind of like Portal but with mirrors, mixed with some of The Witness. You use reflections and perspective to solve puzzles and uncover secrets that are often hidden in plain sight.

I chose D because I got the rare chance to start from scratch, and wanted to pick something that fixed the gripes I have with C++. Happy to answer any questions about what it's been like, but the summary is that I'm really glad I made this choice. I love my super fast build times, sane templates, powerful introspection, hybrid manual/GC memory management, easy interop with C/C++, and so much more. Honestly I'd really struggle to go back to C++ at this point.

Happy to answer any questions, and feedback on the game is always appreciated. And also thanks for answering all my questions on the D forums all these years :)

Now let me say I've been around the block in the programming world. Collecting languages is kind of a pastime for me. And I get a great kick just seeing how different and similar they can be or test driving the new language on the block. But I've mostly done scripting languages professionally. Lately though I've been thinking of trying out embedded linux programming. So I decided to finally learn C++. Two days later, I think I've got the jist of makefiles but they're still confusing. Then I came across CMake. Then setting up CMake with the IDE. I haven't even breached the topic of importing libraries yet. My god the language itself is the easiest part! It's everything else that's a complete mess.

Fast forward a bit and it's taken me two hours to get a small SDL project working in D. May I say DUB is possibly the best packaging system I've ever used. Even better than npm. The documentation is good. There isn't a lot of tutorials from the community, but everything is mostly easily found through a google search. So how is this language not more popular than it is?

I cannot express how much I love programming in D. I have found it a good way to learn a lot of aspects of computer science (I am doing that course next year) but also as a good way to almost get your head into the world of programming in C (which I mess around with here and there).

I cannot express how well of a language D has been designed. Both its syntax (the design of the language's textual representation) as well as the semantics which make for such a great programming system.

There is just so much to love about this language.

UPDATE: And don't forget the amazing developers and community of D; they're spectacular.

As stated by Timur Gafarov in his blogpost, Codecov has ranked Dlang as one of the languages with Highest Growth Usage (based off open source) in 2020. It's on the third place, behind Objective-C and Groovy.

What do you think about it? I like the fact that D is being mentioned on the internet. Actually, I have noticed, that Dlang is being mentioned a lot more often that a year or two ago.

I've been reading a bit about D in the past weeks, because I'm searching for a C(++)-alternative for games (hobbyist/indie stuff). The language looks somewhat like a permanent construction site to me.

E.g. there are attributes to disable the use of the Garbage Collector in functions (@nogc), but when doing so half of the standard library doesn't work anymore. I found posts from 2016 that "work is going into this", but it's not finished yet. Some parts work, some don't.

Then there's the "betterC"-mode, which removes the D-runtime (and so the GC) from the compiled code (sounds very useful for gamedev). But that also removes a lot of language features (typeinfo, classes, built-in threading, static module constructors, etc.) (and of course the same problem with the standard library applies). There are always workarounds, but having to deal with subsets of the language doesn't look attractive to me as a D-beginner.

Then there's a project for better manual memory management (std.experimental.allocator) that's been included in 2015 or so, but in 2020... it's still experimental. Why?

Currently the community is discussing a change whether they'd like to shift to a memory-safe-mode as default (@safe), which forbids certain pointer-operations (unless explicitly allowed by another attribute). That's probably very useful for some areas, but it alledgedly would also break a lot of packages (so a lot more work has to be done), and some users express concerns about a split in the community.

So, I like what the language brings to the table, it looks great in regards to the feature set, benchmarks, compile times. But what I wrote doesn't exactly inspire confidence in me that I should start to use it. It looks as if features get started, but then work on them is not finished and no one cares about it anymore (a bit like a hobby project). As a result the language doesn't look like a well thought out project, but more like a permanent construction site.

And Walter Bright already stated that he plans to add some version of borrow checking to the compiler next.

Am I wrong about this? Or would I have to adapt to a "well, it kinda works"-mindset when I would use D?

Ok bit of a ramble here but I'm loving the Better C posts that have been made recently.

I've been keeping an eye on D for years, occasionally deciding I'd use it but always getting a bit annoyed and moving on. I think my problem was being a C++ programmer and trying to write C++ in D, and it's not the same language and I always got stuck. Things like "how classes work, and structs, post-blit??? Garbage Collection??? Weird strings, and ranges? Why can't it just work easily like C++". Although I wanted to like D I always couldn't help see it as a bad copy of C++ that I was much more familiar with.

I never managed to get over that until recently.

And then I got a bit fed up with C++ for personal projects. I still use it all the time for work. I went back to writing C99 for my own stuff and honestly, it felt so liberating. All the friction and pain of C++ went away. Sure, it didn't have a lot of the features of C++ but the code flowed so much better.

Then I saw the betterC posts and tried D again, and this time I loved it. It's just like C only it has modules, and overloaded functions, and a better library, and all kinds of improvements - but it still felt like C.

Of course then I started using "real" D more and more, when you start adding features one by one, they suddenly make sense. Struct and Classes working differently? Well of couse that makes sense now. postblit.. I wish C++ worked like that, garbage Collection? Sure, there are times when I don't want to use it, but as I started writing C like code in D I know how and when to avoid it, but increasingly I don't want to avoid it because it's easy and fast and efficient.

I really think my difficulty was trying to go from C++ to D and seeing D as a bad copy of C++. Going to via C99 made it so much easier to see that D took a different and offten better direction when it evolved from C.

Loving it now, and I'm currently writing some low level opengl code which will be in a C style but will provide buffers and shaders and piplelines in an easy to use format, and then I plan to use that in some tools and probably will use full on garbage collected D for that using my library as a utility, and an actual game that will probably stick to a more C like subset and largely avoid garbage collection but it's great to have the choice.

Thanks to everyone involved in D, it's a great language and deserved much more success.