The D Language Front-End Is Trying Now To Get Into GCC 9

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The D Language Front-End Is Trying Now To Get Into GCC 9

Going on for a while now have been D language front-end patches for GCC to allow this programming language to be supported by the GNU Compiler Collection. It's been a long battle getting to this state but it looks like it soon might be mainlined...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-9-D-Language-Patches

[GunpowaderGuy]

Sounds about right , a language that failed to gain traction trying to be mainlined in the compiler virtually abandoned for implementing new languages

[linner]

Is Walter still working on D? If so, man, that guy is tenacious!

I messed around with D way back before even version 1. It was a good idea and fun but suffered from a poor compiler environment. DMD just didn't cut it and gcc produced faster code. It took so long to start getting decent backends that I gave up. By the time they had something I didn't care any more because new C and C++ standards were revitalizing them and scripting languages were performing better than ever.

Frankly, if you want to program in an odd-ball static language then do either Rust or Go. Go also has a poor compiler/back-end environment but at least it's supported by a lot of money (for now). Rust suffers from the Scala/OCaml/et al problem in that it supports too many programming paradigms which ends up making even your own code difficult to understand if you leave it for a while. I really like functional programming. I'm an old-school Erlang developer. However, the way it's mixed in to these other languages is just complicated.

At the end of the day you just can't beat plain old C or C++ when it makes sense. At least for low-level stuff. At the high level you aren't messing with compiled languages in the first place.

[Weasel]

Sounds about right , a language that failed to gain traction

Just waiting for the stupid Rust fad to pass in the same way.

[GunpowaderGuy]

linner are you referring to the way Rust handles mutability , that shared values are inmutable by default but can be modified by using additional abstractions that guarantee thread safety ( eg refcell ) ?

[Michael_S]

What is this, drive-by-shit-on?

1. Yes, some high profile projects use the (excellent) LLVM/Clang compiler suite. But since Linux and git use GCC, GCC is not dead or dying.

2. Yes, the languages D, Go, and Rust are a much harder sell today than they were before C++11 and newer. But D and Rust have some really cool features that C++ can't ever get because of backwards compatibility requirements. (I never looked at Go.). And the hot project in D right now is ABI compatibility with C++, which would make D a very practical choice for shops with existing C++ code.

[caligula]

2. Yes, the languages D, Go, and Rust are a much harder sell today than they were before C++11 and newer. But D and Rust have some really cool features that C++ can't ever get because of backwards compatibility requirements. (I never looked at Go.). And the hot project in D right now is ABI compatibility with C++, which would make D a very practical choice for shops with existing C++ code.

I'm no D expert, but last time I checked, the "really cool features" in D have been later implemented in C++. All the constexpr stuff, lambdas, template extensions, static asserts, and so on. The builtin unit test block doesn't replace a full unit test suite. D might be a better C++, but if a project requires C++ level code generation, it could just pick C++ these days. Go and Rust solve different problems, but D is just C++ "on steroids".

[Szzz]

What is this, drive-by-shit-on?

1. Yes, some high profile projects use the (excellent) LLVM/Clang compiler suite. But since Linux and git use GCC, GCC is not dead or dying.

2. Yes, the languages D, Go, and Rust are a much harder sell today than they were before C++11 and newer. But D and Rust have some really cool features that C++ can't ever get because of backwards compatibility requirements. (I never looked at Go.). And the hot project in D right now is ABI compatibility with C++, which would make D a very practical choice for shops with existing C++ code.

How does git uses GCC? I think like many other C software it can be compiled with different C compilers. GCC isn't dying but D was never really alive. Unlike Rust and Go, it failed to gain any significant mindshare and there is no reason to believe it will. Adding D frontend to GCC is really strange, why not to add a dozen other frontends for languages with similar popularity?

[starshipeleven]

Just waiting for the stupid Rust fad to pass in the same way.

I don't think what is left of your natural lifespan is long enough to actually wait that out.

[Szzz]

I don't think what is left of your natural lifespan is long enough to actually wait that out.

Or, in the words of the borrow checker: you do not live long enough.