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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

D now has an Ownership/Borrowing system implemented (though it is in its early stages). It will work with existing code, including DasBetterC code. You're able to incrementally adapt a program to O/B rather than rewrite it.

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Was this a response to something else in this thread that you accidentally top-posted?

It's cool, technically, but maybe a little off-topic.

I think it's just a shameless plug from the creator of D :)

Rust has shown that an O/B system is viable, and now D shows that an O/B system can work with C-like syntax.

What's your opinion on it? Good idea? Bad idea?

On an O/B system? I think it's a good idea, otherwise I would not have implemented it.

This is a 'mindshare' game. D had its chance, now Rust has its chance. Would have been cool though if D had caught on more back in the day. Re-invention seems to be impossible to avoid in the software world.

If rust still has people talking about missing C++ for faster compile times I don't think anything has solidified yet.

It hasn't solidified for the same reason that C++ in many ways still hasn't solidified. Software is a very young industry by many standards and we still haven't found the best way to make it. Rust is one way to do it, but there are many others besides, in the end which tool wins out is less important than that we make some progress and get out of the tar-pit that we've been stuck in for the last two decades.

All we seem to be doing is make more layers of gray goo and leaky abstractions that we then plumb together to attempt to make reliable systems. It still doesn't feel right to me.

idk man, people can dish out complicated, hard tested, reliable systems in a really short time. most aspects of most languages have been severely altered and improved...

Sure, we’ve made huge progress, and are still making huge progress, but it’s just not enough.

> idk man, people can dish out complicated, hard tested, reliable systems in a really short time

You must be living in some alternative universe. What I typically come across, even in fairly young companies, is tech debt ridden, buggy, endless cakes of layer upon layer of mostly cruft with a spiffy looking front thrown over the whole. Pretty icing on a crappy cake. As soon as you lift that top layer the illusion crumbles. I'd be happy to bet that most companies that run services out there would not survive a hostile audit of their code and systems.

For those not aware, Walter is the creator of D. I feel like this almost constitutes shitting on someone's Show HN post.

It definitely isn't, but if you feel like going for the most uncharitable reading possible be my guest. I respect Walter a lot more than you probably realize.

Hmm. Did you edit / adjust the "D had its chance" statement? I thought that ended with a period. If not, apologies. But it did come across as harsh :).

No, I did not.

> D had its chance

What is stopping people to download a D compiler and write software in it right now?

Nothing. The problem is, by and large they don’t. D is a fantastic project and an important step forward, but Rust has won the mind share game.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019

For me, a mild addiction to learning nim/wren and porting code to them. D and Rust can wait a little longer.

People forget that there's a big world out there. We're all doing our thing.

Rust only proves that promotion buys mindshare. Since money buys promotion, and because of endless unscrupulous capital investment to two of Rust's most evangelical promoters: Mozilla and Cloudflare; Rust indeed has its chance. Make no mistake that is all there is to this.

Fifteen years ago Apple underwent a similar endeavor to convert all of its C++ code to Objective-C or even C. Apple isn't a leader in this decision-space; they're just a victim of this meme.

Thank you for responding. There's always a room for an awesome programming language. I've never used D but as a professional c++ programmer, I admire what you set out to do. (Assuming you are the creator....)

Please ignore the naysayers. HN is diverse in degree and area of knowledge and some people even think electron is the only cross platform gui framework.

Oh, I've always had plenty naysayers. If I ever paid any attention to them, I'd be a total failure.

I think D didn't gain the momentum because of GC. O/B system is interesting but makes the syntax ugly (at least in Rust's case).

Had D gone with a (deterministic) ref counting like Swift and Vala, it would've been much more popular I think. Such memory management keeps the syntax cute :) while not sacrificing the determinism.

We looked hard at an automatic ref counting system. We could not find a way to make it 100% memory safe while allowing pointer access for efficiency. An O/B system makes this workable.

D doesn't change the syntax for O/B.

That's great to know. I'll to check it out. D is a great language and it's good to see it's getting even better.

Walter, have you seen http://aardappel.github.io/lobster/memory_management.html ? If you looked at refcounting, this may be a way to make that compile time.

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