Last update August 25, 2007

Bruce Adams

Hi,

   I'm a long term user of C++ and just starting out with D. I'm mostly convinced but there are

some cracks showing. I'm currently working on a small project in D which I intend to compare with its equivalent in C++ and possibly another contender language or two for subsequent projects.

I discovered two compiler bugs within two days of using D and have since made two feature requests. All of which can be found here.

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&email1=tortoise_74@yahoo.co.uk&emailtype1=exact&emailassigned_to1=1&emailreporter1=1

Contact Details

I can be contacted as tortoise_74 on yahoo (.co.uk).

My home web page is:

http://www.tortoise74.me.uk

There isn't very much programming related stuff there at the moment but there may be in the future.

Where I think D is currently (Aug-2007) weak:

Tools

DMD supports unit testing and coverage analysis but only in a very crude way. Its better than nothing but its practically an afterthought in an otherwise well thought out refactoring and enhancement of C++.

The coverage tool gives only line coverage. Executing all lines does not prove good test coverage.

Executing less than all the lines in a module does demonstrate poor coverage however.

assert is too weak by itself for a unit testing framework. See for example xunit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUnit

DMDs error messages are very unhelpful when compared to g++'s error messages.

Some are still missing basic info like line numbers.

gdc is broken on cygwin (windows)

Doxygen support is incomplete - I have yet to discover how much of a problem this is.

Libraries

There aren't enough containers. The arrays are good but they are not enough on their own.

Documentation

Many things remain mysterious without repeated newgroup postings.

cracks

What are the 'cracks' in D I mention above I hear you ask?

constness gone mad

In D 2.x I currently have to write string foo = "bar"[]; or occasionally even cast(char[])("bar"[]) because the semantics of const, invariant and string constants haven't been trashed out properly. I'm hoping this will improve with time.

The mixin construct is powerful but too much like a glorified macro. There are better ways to do meta-programming.

Templates are a good example of how meta-programming should be done. They add a very specific ability. Mixins like macros seem too general purpose and therefore open to abuse. Like everyone else I will be abusing them heavily until I think of something better.

__FILE__ & __LINE__ are hard to use

see:

http://www.digitalmars.com/pnews/read.php?server=news.digitalmars.com&group=digitalmars.D.learn&artnum=9147