The D programming language

What Hacker News says

1. jordighJun 2017
   It's not language-agnostic, but it's still a great book: The D Programming Language. The reason I recommend it is because Alexandrescu is a great writer who knows a lot about programming languages and the kinds of tradeoffs that a low-level, practical, and safe programming language like D must do.

   Even if you never intend to program in D, I encourage you to read this book to get a different view on metaprogramming, memory safety, and concurrency.

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2. markdoubleyouFeb 2017
   Yeah, the industry is aching for a good solution. My favorite articles on the topic are:

   - Edward Lee's "The Problem with Threads": https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-...

   - The occasionally hilarious chapter on concurrency (especially the "Concurrentgate" section) from Andrei Alexandrescu's "The D Programming Language", available in its entirety here: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1609144

   I think MS made great progress with the TPL and kickstarted an industry-wide movement with async/await. But certain aspects of C# still drive me nuts and will allow a junior dev to blow a leg off (I'd give my left arm for C++-style const references and/or compiler-enforced immutability). At one point I went so far as to play around with a Rosyln analyzer to tackle the problem (https://github.com/markwaterman/CondensedDotNet/blob/master/...), but gave up after realizing anything more then a token effort would be a huge undertaking.

   Other languages are nibbling away at the edge of the concurrency problem with language-level support for CSP (golang), actors, etc., but, outside of the functional world (Erlang), I don't seen anyone working to address concurrency from the ground up.

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3. jordighMay 2016
   I recently started using D and I was loving it so far. I bought Alexandrescu's excellent The D Programming Language. It's a fun book, teaches a lot about programming in general, and even if you don't think you'll use D, I recommend reading this book to get ideas about what programming languages can do.

   Then I ran into this:

   https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15994

   The response to this has almost completely demolished my interest in D. It is with a broken hacker heart that I think I need to step away from D. The problem is not that it's possible to segfault in D or dereference a null pointer in D, as Rust allows this too, but that it's so easy to do so. The worst part is that the response is to blame the learner instead of blaming the language. If I wanted to be blamed, I would go back to C++.

   I tried to suggest a language change in IRC, such as for example disallowing bare "SomeClass someobject;" declarations and requiring either "SomeClass someobject = new SomeClass(foo, bar, baz)" or "SomeClass someobject = null;" in order to make it explicit that the reference will be null, but everyone in IRC seemed to think that it was impossible to change the D language. This despite how the language is already constantly changing because as blog post mentions, Phobos is rapidly changing.

   I am going to try to raise this concern again in the D mailing list/forum (it's actually really cool these two are the same thing). There are so many good ideas in D, and I really loved everything up until I ran into this. Maybe Walter or Andrei will see the importance of making it more difficult to dereference null pointers.

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4. jordighApr 2016
   Or the D standard, or the Java standard, or the Fortran standard, or the Golang standard...

   It is the GNU compiler collection, after all. I'm actually particularly excited about a new release of gdc myself. I've been reading Alexandrescu's excellent The D Programming Language, and I think it may be just the better C++ that I always wanted, ahead of Golang and Rust.

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5. slvnJun 2015
   the d programming language by andrei alexandrescu (ISBN-13: 978-0321635365)
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6. ecoFeb 2014
   If you enjoyed that you should pick up The D Programming Language by Andrei. It's a good read. Metaprogramming with D is a dream compared to C++ so some of the techniques in Modern C++ Design aren't even necessary.

   http://www.amazon.com/D-Programming-Language-Andrei-Alexandr...

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