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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Yup. D is the source for a number of recent features in other languages.

The reason I embarked on D is because C and C++ were too reluctant to move forward.

>The reason I embarked on D is because C and C++ were too reluctant to move forward.

I just want to take this opportunity to say thank you. While D may not taken up from the rest of the world. It has surely lived on in C, C++ and many other languages. Still wish more people would use Das C.

Yes, the influence is there.

For example, C++ pivoted to using ranges instead of iterators, and even C# changed their iterators to be like D's ranges (or so I've been told).

Do you think you will keep moving forward for the next decade or will you merge when c/cpp becomes similar enough to D ? Maybe your group still has tons of ideas that need their own space to grow.

The ideas for advancing D come thick and fast. C and C++ will never merge with D, because we have different philosophies of what makes for a great programming language.

For example, D will never have a preprocessor. Or over my dead body :-/

> For example, D will never have a preprocessor. Or over my dead body :-/

Indeed. Compile time evaluation combined with a preprocessor would make for some serious head scratching when it comes to trusting trust.

Thanks a lot for your answer, I have another one, what languages or topics do you follow for inspiration regarding concepts ?

I could spent 500% of my time studying other languages. So I don't, but the D user community isn't shy about doing that for me!

C++ is trying to eliminate the use of preprocessor. they can't get rid of it but you shouldn't use it.

Stroustrup has been saying that in print since 1993, and it hasn’t happened yet.

I see revision after revision of Standard C++, and no progress in that direction. I (along with Andrei Alexandrescu and Herb Sutter) made a proposal to add D's static if feature to eliminate the need for #if. It was vehemently rejected.

The biggest advance would be Microsoft adopt D.

I'm curious, is there any features, from any language, that you wish you had implemented, or want to copy, in D?

There's active work going on to add pattern matching. Just recently I completed the addition of move constructors. They are different from C++'s, and I bet they'll turn out to be much better.

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