So, how is it going with D? Last time I gave it a look I really liked it, but I sadly left the place when I hit the multiple standard libraries problems.
I started working with it for DSP and game code recently. It hasn't posed any major issues yet. I am getting what I wanted out of the language - something that is more modern than C or C++, but retains much of the root lineage. There is a lot of room to configure things to your liking and disable things you don't want.
The standard library forking issue is far in the past now - which doesn't mean that it's as complete and comprehensive as it could be yet - for an example of one I ran into the other day, the "pure" annotation is absent from some math functions because they call out to C standard libraries which use global state for error codes.
But the things that are the focus now are mainly "nice-to-have" technologies that will be good for productivity - check out "std.experimental.allocator" for an idea of what's cooking. There are also multiple implementations of the compiler tech rolling around now, not just the Digital Mars one, which is a good sign for future quality.
I never use anything else anymore for personal projects, unless I absolutely have to due to missing a certain library. A well-known phenomenon in the D community is that it "spoils" you such that when you have to use another language all you can think about is how much easier it would be to do your task in D, and how you miss certain features from D (such as the phenomenally better template syntax compared to C++). I've experienced this many times, such as when writing a large-ish Python script, or when working on a mobile game in C# + Unity. I really wish I could use D at work.
Using D for most of my personal projects, which are almost all pet game engines. Its a real joy to use. I get to write lighting fast code with the productivity I'm used to with high-level languages. Its really the best of both worlds.
I couldn't dream of writing all of the features I now have in another systems language because of all the extra scaffolding it would require, and I couldn't hope to get anywhere near the performance I have in higher-level languages because I'd lose value types and manual memory management.
The multiple stdlib problem has been solved for years now.
Hi. I only joined hacker news relatively recently, but I have been programmimg since 1983. My first 'open source' contribution was to Tom Jenning's bulletin board routing algorithm in 1989.
I'm in the hedge fund world, and my day job is investing but I use technology to help me do that. Andy Smith gave a talk on using D at a 20bn+ hedge fund at dconf. My background is at similar large funds, but I am now using D to develop some tools to help the investment process at a smaller but decent sized fund. A couple of D people will be helping me. So it's ready for real work, and the combination of high productivity with efficiency and correctness is a killer feature for my problem set. Fast compilation is also important as its a dynamic environment and you want to iterate quickly.
I'm using D (gdc) for all my personnal and professional projects. At the moment, the only reason I have to sometimes regret C++ is Emscripten, which only accepts C and C++ as input (although it might change one day thanks to ldc compiler).
Everything else works: calling C functions, ctags, syntax highlighting, automatic make dependency generation, integration in Visual Studio, step by step debugging, profiling (oprofile), valgrind, etc.
As a bonus, D makes a fantastic "scripting" language (= no explicit compilation step): at work, we're progressively replacing all of our bash scripts with D scripts.
I use it for econometrics. I write some parts in R and as much as I want in D. I create a dynamic library of the D code and call those functions trivially from R.
The standard library forking issue is far in the past now - which doesn't mean that it's as complete and comprehensive as it could be yet - for an example of one I ran into the other day, the "pure" annotation is absent from some math functions because they call out to C standard libraries which use global state for error codes.
But the things that are the focus now are mainly "nice-to-have" technologies that will be good for productivity - check out "std.experimental.allocator" for an idea of what's cooking. There are also multiple implementations of the compiler tech rolling around now, not just the Digital Mars one, which is a good sign for future quality.