Hacker News Reader

Comment by themerone | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why the developer picked the D language?

Author's talk at dconf (from today, actually) may be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/live/wXTlafzlJVY?feature=shared&t=24...

(Timestamp is 6:45:08)

The author elaborates more in this blog post…

https://zyedidia.github.io/blog/posts/1-d-baremetal/

I wonder why that's something worth wondering about.

Maybe they like it? It's a perfectly reasonable systems language, even if it's not my personal favorite. It might be something questionable if they used Fortran or Algol-68, sure.

I think it's a fair question to ask; what particular qualities of D drew them off the beaten path for this kind of task?

Now, I know the answer as a former D acolyte - it's an interesting language with powerful abstractions, albeit hobbled in some ways - but most people don't, so I think it a reasonable question to ask.

I guess the way I read it was my like "why would you choose D when Rust and Zig exist"...but you're right, it could have been a perfectly curious question.

Fortran and Algol 68 were used to write operating systems before C was invented, hardly questionable.

Starting a new OS in those languages today would be heavily questionable.

Same applies to C, 10 years younger than them, less capable in language security, in an highly connected world, yet people keep doing it.

You're really pettyfogging simply to be contrarian. C is a language with a large and active community, and is still the most common/popular language in its fields. Algol-68 and Fortran are not. It has nothing to do with age of the language and everything to do with modern-day usefilledness.

The fact that you're unable to distinguish the difference means you're being purposefully obtuse and annoying or are simply naive.

A usefulness out of historical accidents and sunken cost.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with the original point.

It definitely has everything to do with sensible decisions.

Ok.

> The fact that you're unable to distinguish the difference means you're being purposefully obtuse and annoying or are simply naive.

This part is really unnecessary. Parent is most likely not "unable to distinguish" and name calling poisons the air and cheapens your other point which I think is good.

Fair point, I apologize for the petty comments. They were unnecessary. I sometimes have a low bar for intentional contrarianism/obtuseness at the expense of useful discourse.

Cant speak for the author, but I would pick D for anything where C++ is appropriate, but I want to have less hassle (and dont need any dependencies).

D is very, very fun.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com