Thoughts While Reading About D

I first heard about D quite a while ago, but I never really looked into it. I stumbled upon it again today and I’m actually reading on the website right now. Some quick thoughts I wanted to jot down:

  • It’s compiled, no VM or interpreter, and supports inline assembly, pointers, etc. (could it be used in embedded systems?)
  • Doesn’t do 16-bit stuff very well (hmm, maybe not all embedded systems…)
  • No preprocessor, yay!
  • The above means, no #include, it has modules that you import.
  • Arrays know their size!
  • Arrays can be resized
  • Arrays can be associative (i.e. hash tables)
  • No forward declaration needed (from they day I learned C I’ve wondered why in the world the compiler couldn’t figure this out itself)
  • Function literals and nested functions (hence, closures). Wow.
  • Garbage collection and automatic memory allocation, but you can override it if you need to (good!)
  • Built-in synchronization
  • Direct access to C functions
  • Standard object file format

It also says it doesn’t have, “a religion, or an overriding philosophy,” yet it does seem to pick a side on the strong typing debate by advocating its better typedefs and function In and Out Parameters. It also goes on for a bit more about unit tests and “contracts” (not sure what that is even) than I figured a less philosophical language would (maybe that’s just because I’m not completely sold on those myself), saying, “if it has no unit tests and no contracts, it’s unacceptable.”

It looks promising from the marketing spiel. I’ve been secretly hoping that something a little higher-level than C++ could be used for writing firmware. Maybe D could be it. I’ll have to actually download a compiler and try it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SystemVerilog Fork Disable "Gotchas"

This is a long post with a lot of SystemVerilog code. The purpose of this entry is to hopefully save you from beating your head against the wall trying to figure out some of the subtleties of SystemVerilog processes (basically, threads). Subtleties like these are commonly referred to in the industry as "Gotchas" which makes them sound so playful and fun, but they really aren't either. I encourage you to run these examples with your simulator (if you have access to one) so that a) you can see the results first hand and better internalize what's going on, and b) you can tell me in the comments if this code works fine for you and I'll know I should go complain to my simulator vendor. OK, I'll start with a warm-up that everyone who writes any Verilog or SystemVerilog at all should be aware of, tasks are static by default. If you do this: module top; task do_stuff ( int wait_time); #wait_time $display ( "waited %0d, then did stuff" , wa
Read more

'git revert' Is Not Equivalent To 'svn revert'

I just learned that if you have some changes in your working tree that you want to get rid of, you don't type 'git revert' like you might guess. No, that's what cvs, subversion, mercurial, and bazaar (to name a few) use revert to mean, but not git. With git, revert is used to undo actual commits. Thankfully, you can undo your revert with another 'git revert', I just learned. So let me repeat to be clear, if you have changes to your working files that you want to abandon, DO NOT do this: git revert HEAD That will undo your last commit. Do this instead: git reset --hard HEAD I'm glad I have that straightened out now. I'm wondering if /etc was really a good place for me to start out playing with git. UPDATE: Nearly two years later and I'm still getting comments on this. I'm glad I've been able to help people out this way. The discussion in the comments is good, and one thing I'd like to point out is that I now always use
Read more

Put /etc Under Revision Control (with git)

UPDATE : There is a much easier way now : sudo aptitude install etckeeper There, now etc is under revision control and changes are automatically committed with a helpful message after you install new packages. Thanks for the tip, Marcelo! Read on for the original blog entry. --- I put my /etc directory under revision control. I used git. It's awesome. Not that I think I'm going to wholesale copy my /etc from one machine to another, nor because I'm going to branch my /etc directory and spend weeks developing some cool new feature (whatever that would look like...) and then merge it back into the main branch. No, it's mostly because I like the idea of having the big "undo" option that having things under revision control provides. Having to commit changes and write check-in comments when I make changes helps me stay more organized too. It's never good when I go in willy-nilly to make a "quick change" to some configuration file. I r
Read more