Three Cool Things About D - The Case for the D Programing Language

Google Tech Talk
July 29, 2010

ABSTRACT

C++ has been through many battles and won most of them. Invariably it has been patched with more armor, given more makeshift weaponry, and sent back to battle. Many contenders have tried to spell its demise, but C++ has remained undefeated ruler in one niche: high-performance systems with difficult modeling challenges. Between the halt of Moore's law for serial speed and the continued demand for performance, one thing has become clear: a replacement for C++ must be good at what C++ is good at, and good at what C++ is bad at. The D programming language is that contender. It packs much more punch in a much smaller package. Better yet, D has the flexibility to compete against other languages on their own turf.

This talk gives an introduction to the D programming language along with its motivation and basic tenets. The person who asks the more intriguing question wins a signed copy of the recently-published "The D Programming Language".

Andrei Alexandrescu coined the colloquial term "modern C++", used today to describe a collection of important C++ styles and idioms. His eponymous book on the topic, Modern C++ Design (Addison-Wesley, 2001), revolutionized C++ programming and produced a lasting influence not only on subsequent work on C++, but also on other languages and systems. Andrei's work has garnered appreciation in both industrial and academic circles through is work on C++ and on Machine Learning applied to natural language. Since 2006, Andrei has been second-in-command to Walter Bright, the D programming language inventor and initial implementer. Andrei co-designed many important features of D and authored a large part of D's standard library, as well as the recent book "The D Programming Language". Andrei holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington and a BS in Electrical Engineering from University "Politehnica" Bucharest. He works as a Research Scientist for Facebook.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Yudle Joza]

the D and Go people should pool their efforts, merge the two and call it 'The GoD Programming Language'

[SatansSpatula]

Love the douchebag at 13:16 who can't listen (source, not headers) and has to prove himself right. It must really suck to work at Google, dealing with alpha-geeks like this all day.

[lucinos19]

or GoD programming language XD

[ppetrovdotnet]

so true, and the best is, you can apply back techniques learned in your fav language.

[ppetrovdotnet]

too bad they started banning Java :P

of being lame....

[ppetrovdotnet]

tools get obsolete, because they got replaced by better tools. and we are talking the same tool here, general programming language !!

[ppetrovdotnet]

funny to see al those flying arguments , like features and modeling power must go together:

for me LUA is the most simple with the least features language yet very easy and powerful to express anything you want

[Eko Wahyudin]

The poor things about D is I must rewrite the constructor for each derived class. even it's have same parameter, and same algorithm with constructor in super class.

I do not understand why D adopt C++ style rather pascal style? I hope D3 come with pascal style. Or maybe the constructor still called "this" but I hope as flexible as pascal have.

[GathGealaich]

"D compiles 4.5 times faster than Go."

Such a statement should scare off any critical thinker:

- Why does he compare languages and not implementations?

- Does it make sense to specify it so precisely when the languages are different?

- Does it make sense to compare it so precisely when the equivalent programs, properly written in each respective language, will have very different structure?

[lockbert99]

The questioner at 29:33, 32:00, and 33:32, was Robert Griesemer one of the three guys (Ken Thompson and Rob Pike being the other two) who began the Go Language work at Google in their 20% personal-project time.

[Bogdan Bugarschi]

programming languages are tools, a programmer needs to choose the best tool for the job at hand. i love java my self and i prefer it over others, but say i need to make a client-sided dynamic web app. ofc there's java applets but its not the best solution, i would use javascript(and html+css ofc). there are a lot of scenarios where one language is better then others. currently we don't have a "one size fits all language" at the moment.

[Gor Gyolchanyan]

I was thinking more of a "Do programming language" :-)