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Comment by tastyminerals | Hacker News Reader

I started reading about D couple of months ago after work. For me, it appeared to be easier than Scala for example which I use at work. Not only is it simpler, it is faster and I am not even talking about compile times. These features alone persuaded me to rewrite couple of Scala based data processing algorithms we use for our ML models to give it a try. What I really liked is that you don't have to know all about the language to write perfomant code. Still keep wondering how does it get constantly overlooked.

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> Still keep wondering how does it get constantly overlooked.

Because you kee thinking in technological terms. Languages have come and gone, those who stayed are either old enough to have a midlife crisis or are supported by at least one big company. For all the merits D has there is no big name willing to push it forward, even though its creator is now working for Facebook and is doing some internal work: Facebook didn't express any interest in showing this off.

It really is a shame, because D has a lot of things that might interest programmers, all it takes is a little more presence.

Andrei left Facebook in 2015

https://forum.dlang.org/thread/xsqrdgwnzehdmfmvcznn@forum.dl...

and andrei is a major contributor but not the creator.

Plus he's no longer involved with D.

He is. He just stepped down from the leadership due to family reasons. Atila Neves took it over now.

Not true -- he has just stepped back from a leadership role afaict.

This seems to be an increasingly growing niche where D is gaining popularity. I see more and more people turning to D where they would normally use python or R for adhoc data crunching

We are using D for high performance computational biology -- I brought a Go dev and a python dev both onboard with minimal learning curve. Even the powerful template metaprogramming seemed really easy for the team to pick up. I believe this is because it really has a nice design (compared with, say, C++, which I would never, ever use in general bioinformatics unless team had specific past expertise)

I also use D for data & ML at work (Netflix) when standard python workflow doesn't cut it anymore. There's just so far you can go with the typical "call a popular python lib interfacing with a C++ backend" paradigm before hitting a brick wall.

How far is that? What about Cython?

As one of those people, I can say the reason is for the C-level processing power with the approachable syntactic sugar. Out of all the languages gaining popularity for their ability to run natively (Rust, Go, D, etc), I've felt that D is the most natural continuation of C/C++, at least syntactically. I haven't touched the language in about a year, but I'm personally rooting for it.

And with D as Better C, (-betterC switch), it's easy to convert your C project to D, one file at a time, and not require the D runtime library (only the standard C library is required).

The original impetus for this was so I could incrementally convert the D compiler backend itself from "C with Classes" to D.

I try to use D for that (difficult because the libraries are fairly low level, I would say sparse but calling into C and C++ is pretty trivial) because, for the same effort I put into bullying python to do what I want, I can write type safe (generic) code that is both actually readable and ready to be reused if needs be. And sometimes orders of magnitude faster.

That and ranges (D/Andrei's preferred model for iteration) are excellent - in my view at least.

eBay's tsv-utils author here. A fair bit of performance benchmarking was done on the tools with the goal of exploring this type of use (data crunching). D did really well (tsv-utils are fast!). There's more info on the benchmarks page in the github repo. Perhaps the best summary is the slides from a talk I did at 2018 DConf. Links:

- tsv-utils repo: https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils

- Performance studies: https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils/blob/master/docs/Performan...

- Talk slides: https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils/blob/master/docs/dconf2018...

It doesn't even need to be an alternative to Python or R, since it's really easy to interoperate with both languages. This is in addition to tools like eBay's tsv-utils.

http://code.dlang.org/packages/pyd

https://embedr.netlify.com/

http://code.dlang.org/packages/autowrap

https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils

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