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by kaleidic 3289 days ago
It's a big world out there. Would you ever imagine that D would be taking market share from... Extended Pascal? But there's a naval architect who designs great big ships with a 500k sloc codebase he is exploring porting to D. Web guys get the attention but enterprise users are a much bigger world than just that.

If something is growing very quickly then saying it hasn't yet dethroned C, so it won't ever be significant seems to me to be a bit brittle thinking. Compound growth and the passage of time - thats what has been underway for some time now.

http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png
1 comments
Ar-Curunir 3289 days ago
I did not compare D to C, but rather to Rust, Swift, and Go. Compared to D, Go already has huge marketshare. Rust, similarly, excels in spaces that D does not endeavor to work in (no-managed-runtime settings), and is beginning to see adoption in areas where performance is critical.

From what I have seen of D, it provides a C++ without some of the cruft, but without trying to solve other issues with C++-like languages (for eg: usefulness of Algebraic Data Types). Why should someone choose D today over Go or Rust for any project? I have yet to see a convincing answer.

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acehreli 3289 days ago
Over Go: D has meta programming, exceptions, and many more useful features

Over Rust: No need to learn new concepts like borrowing

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rbehrends 3289 days ago
> Why should someone choose D today over Go or Rust for any project?

D over Go: D has much better language mechanisms for abstraction and programming in the large.

Go over D: Go has an incremental, mature GC.

Rust and D do not quite target the same application domains (though there's overlap), so it's difficult to compare them. Insofar as they do (D with @nogc and @safe), the tradeoffs become rather complicated.

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