I really like D and want to use D instead of Zig if I can...
But it's difficult to do so! Nothing to do with marketing in my case, at least.
The reasons are :
* `dub` is badly documented and does dumb things like including test code in the generated binary.
* `serve-d` is terrible. It can't handle even my little hello world programs - either crashes or consumes 100% CPU until I manually kill it.
* MacOS support sucks. All the time I have problems: the linker didn't work for years (fixed now). Immediate segmentation faults currently (fixed in nightly AFAIK). C code using the new flat128 doesn't compile (I think it was fixed already?). Just constant frustration.
* Too many features, many broken. It has an experimental borrow-checking feature, I tried to use it but it's largely undocumented. People in the Forum told me to that feature is completely unfinished. It has an allocators package as well, but no idea how I can make use of those like I would in Zig. Would love to see a well written post about that.
Using D in betterC mode is what I am most interested about exactly because it looks more like Zig and C than Java - and performs much better. But currently, that means forgetting about Phobos, the standard library, as that's written exclusively with GC and Exceptions in mind. Maybe that's ok as you can just use all C libraries you want, but would be nice to have some D conveniences to make that worthwhile.
Apart from that, I completely agree that D's comptime and metaprogramming is the best I've seen in any language (except for Lisp of course). All I need to keep using D is much better tooling and clarification about what parts of the language are "half-baked" (especially around DIP1000) and which parts are stable - perhaps "editions" will give us that, will check it out when it's ready. Oh and also top-notch MacOS support... I know that's a moving target but even Zig manages to handle that just fine, why not D?!
But it's difficult to do so! Nothing to do with marketing in my case, at least. The reasons are :
* `dub` is badly documented and does dumb things like including test code in the generated binary.
* `serve-d` is terrible. It can't handle even my little hello world programs - either crashes or consumes 100% CPU until I manually kill it.
* MacOS support sucks. All the time I have problems: the linker didn't work for years (fixed now). Immediate segmentation faults currently (fixed in nightly AFAIK). C code using the new flat128 doesn't compile (I think it was fixed already?). Just constant frustration.
* Too many features, many broken. It has an experimental borrow-checking feature, I tried to use it but it's largely undocumented. People in the Forum told me to that feature is completely unfinished. It has an allocators package as well, but no idea how I can make use of those like I would in Zig. Would love to see a well written post about that.
Using D in betterC mode is what I am most interested about exactly because it looks more like Zig and C than Java - and performs much better. But currently, that means forgetting about Phobos, the standard library, as that's written exclusively with GC and Exceptions in mind. Maybe that's ok as you can just use all C libraries you want, but would be nice to have some D conveniences to make that worthwhile.
Apart from that, I completely agree that D's comptime and metaprogramming is the best I've seen in any language (except for Lisp of course). All I need to keep using D is much better tooling and clarification about what parts of the language are "half-baked" (especially around DIP1000) and which parts are stable - perhaps "editions" will give us that, will check it out when it's ready. Oh and also top-notch MacOS support... I know that's a moving target but even Zig manages to handle that just fine, why not D?!