I'd rather say that the GC is the superpower of the language. It allows you to quickly prototype without focusing too much on performance, but it also allows you to come back to the exact same piece of code and rewrite it using malloc at any time. C# or Java don't have this, nor can they compile C code and seamlessly interoperate with it — but in D, this is effortless.

Furthermore, if you dig deeper, you'll find that D offers far greater control over its garbage collector than any other high-level language, to the point that you can eagerly free chunks of allocated memory, minimizing or eliminating garbage collector stops where it matters.

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ceteia 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do you know of any popular real-time (for some definition of real-time) applications written in D? Like, streaming music or video? C has FFmpeg [0]:

> FFmpeg is proudly written in the C programming language for the highest performance. Other fashionable languages like C++, C#, Rust, Go etc do not meet the needs of FFmpeg.

How does D perform in benchmarks against other programming languages?

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ffmpeg_ffmpeg-is-proudly-writ...

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arcadia_leak 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

D by definition meets the FFmpeg's criteria because it's also a C compiler. Because of that I never wondered how D performs in the benchmarks, as I know for sure that it can give me the performance of C where I need it.

	▲	ceteia 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But then, to use D for performance, would I then have to master both D, C and their interaction? That doesn't seem great. It's like having to learn 2 languages and also how they interact.

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nicwilson 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sociomantic (bought by Dunhumby, now defunct IIRC) had a realtime advertisement business built in D.

Weka have a realtime distributed filesystem written in D, used for ML/HPC workloads.

	▲	ceteia 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Weka have a realtime distributed filesystem written in D, used for ML/HPC workloads. This https://github.com/weka ? Most of the D repositories appear to have very little activity. The Go repositories seem to have more activity.

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rafaelmn 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> C# or Java don't have this, nor can they compile C code and seamlessly interoperate with it — but in D, this is effortless.

C# C interop is pretty smooth, Java is a different story. The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point.

>Furthermore, if you dig deeper, you'll find that D offers far greater control over its garbage collector than any other high-level language, to the point that you can eagerly free chunks of allocated memory, minimizing or eliminating garbage collector stops where it matters.

Yes, and the no-gc stuff was just attempts to backpedal on the wrong initial decision to fit into the use-cases they should have targeted from the start in my opinion.

Look D was an OK language but it had no corporate backing and there was no case where it was "the only good solution". If it was an actual C++ modernization attempt that stayed C compatible it would have seen much better adoption.

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arcadia_leak 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> C# C interop is pretty smooth

True, but you still need to either generate or manually write the bindings. In D, you just import the C headers directly without depending on the bindings' maintainers.

> If it was an actual C++ modernization attempt that stayed C compatible it would have seen much better

Any D compiler is literally also a C compiler. I sincerely don't know how can one be more C compatible than that.

> Yes, and the no-gc stuff was just attempts to backpedal on the wrong initial decision

I think that it was more of an attempt to appease folks who won't use GC even with a gun to their head.

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rafaelmn 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not saying D didn't have nice features - but if D/C#/Java are valid options I'm never picking D - language benefits cannot outweigh the ecosystem/support behind those two. Go picked a niche with backend plumbing and got Google backing to push it through.

Meanwhile look at how popular Zig is getting 2 decades later. Why is that not D ? D also has comp-time and had it for over a decade I think ? Zig proves there's a need that D was in the perfect spot to fill if it did not make the GC decision - and we could have had 2 decades of software written in D instead of C++ :)

	▲	arcadia_leak 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> D/C#/Java are valid options I'm never picking D This is perfectly fair. > D was in the perfect spot to fill if it did not make the GC decision I just find it hard to believe that the GC is the one big wart that pushed everyone away from the language. To me, the GC combined with the full power of a systems language are the killer features that made me stick to D. The language is not perfect and has bad parts too, but I really don't see the GC as one of them.

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cardanome an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point.

That is just the Unity effect. Godot adopted C# because they get paid to do so by Microsoft.

C# allows for far lees control over the garbage collection compared to D. The decision to use C# is partly responsible for the bad reputation of Unity games as it causes a lot of stutters when people are not very careful about how to manage the memory.

The creator of the Mono runtime actually calls using C# his Multi-million dollar mistake and instead works on swift bindings for Godot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzt36EGKEZo

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arcadia_leak 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point.

Respectfully, it doesn't prove your point. Unity is a commercial product that employed C# because they could sell it easily, not because it's the best language for game dev.

Godot supports C# because Microsoft sponsored the maintainers precisely on that condition.

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xigoi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point.

Popularity is not proof of anything. C# is popular because it’s made by Microsoft and rode the OOP hype.