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Comment by rafaelmn | Hacker News Reader

> C# or Java don't have this, nor can they compile C code and seamlessly interoperate with it — but in D, this is effortless.

C# C interop is pretty smooth, Java is a different story. The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point.

>Furthermore, if you dig deeper, you'll find that D offers far greater control over its garbage collector than any other high-level language, to the point that you can eagerly free chunks of allocated memory, minimizing or eliminating garbage collector stops where it matters.

Yes, and the no-gc stuff was just attempts to backpedal on the wrong initial decision to fit into the use-cases they should have targeted from the start in my opinion.

Look D was an OK language but it had no corporate backing and there was no case where it was "the only good solution". If it was an actual C++ modernization attempt that stayed C compatible it would have seen much better adoption.

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> C# C interop is pretty smooth

True, but you still need to either generate or manually write the bindings. In D, you just import the C headers directly without depending on the bindings' maintainers.

> If it was an actual C++ modernization attempt that stayed C compatible it would have seen much better

Any D compiler is literally also a C compiler. I sincerely don't know how can one be more C compatible than that.

> Yes, and the no-gc stuff was just attempts to backpedal on the wrong initial decision

I think that it was more of an attempt to appease folks who won't use GC even with a gun to their head.

I'm not saying D didn't have nice features - but if D/C#/Java are valid options I'm never picking D - language benefits cannot outweigh the ecosystem/support behind those two. Go picked a niche with backend plumbing and got Google backing to push it through.

Meanwhile look at how popular Zig is getting 2 decades later. Why is that not D ? D also has comp-time and had it for over a decade I think ? Zig proves there's a need that D was in the perfect spot to fill if it did not make the GC decision - and we could have had 2 decades of software written in D instead of C++ :)

> D/C#/Java are valid options I'm never picking D

This is perfectly fair.

> D was in the perfect spot to fill if it did not make the GC decision

I just find it hard to believe that the GC is the one big wart that pushed everyone away from the language. To me, the GC combined with the full power of a systems language are the killer features that made me stick to D. The language is not perfect and has bad parts too, but I really don't see the GC as one of them.

go had a similar early trajectory where c++ programmers rejected it due to the gc. it gained traction among python/ruby/javascript programmers who appreciated the speed boost and being able to ship a single static binary.

Its not the GC, its that D has no direction. Its kitchen sink of features and the optionality just fragments the ecosystem (betterC, gc) etc, making reusing code hard.

this is the main issue I think with D, yeah.

regarding kitchen-sink-ness it's at least nowhere near as bad as C++, but that bar is basically below the ground anyway so it's not much to write home about.

> Why is that not D ?

You never get a second chance at making a good first impression.

I believe that many people that gladly use Rust or Zig or Go nowadays would be quite happy with D if they were willing to give it a fair evaluation. But I still often find people going "D? I would never use a language where the ecosystem is split between different standard libraries"/"D? No thanks, I prefer compilers that are open source" or similar outdated claims. These things have not been true for a long time, but once they are stuck in the heads of the people, it is over. And these claims spread to other people and get stuck there.

If you do not want to use a GC, it is trivial to avoid it and still be able to use a large chunk of the ecosystem. But often avoiding GC at all costs is not even necessary - you mostly want to avoid it in specific spots. Even many games today are written with tasteful usage of GC.

The one thing that really is a fair disadvantage for D is its small community. And the community is small because the community is too small (chicken/egg) and many believe in claims that have not been true for a long time ...

> You never get a second chance at making a good first impression.

There's a good number of younger programmers like myself who've never heard of D, say, before 2017 when those false claims were still true. Our first impression of D comes from its state today, which is not that far behind from other emerging languages.

> The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point.

That is just the Unity effect. Godot adopted C# because they get paid to do so by Microsoft.

C# allows for far lees control over the garbage collection compared to D. The decision to use C# is partly responsible for the bad reputation of Unity games as it causes a lot of stutters when people are not very careful about how to manage the memory.

The creator of the Mono runtime actually calls using C# his Multi-million dollar mistake and instead works on swift bindings for Godot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzt36EGKEZo

C# wouldn't be a problem for Unity if they hadn't mapped most engine abstractions to class hierarchies with reflection-based dispatch instead of value-type handles and the seldom interface, and had dropped the Boehm GC. .NET has actually got a lot of features to avoid allocations on the hot paths.

The problem is called Mono, and Unity's refusal to pay for an update.

instead they made (or funded? not exactly sure) il2cpp which is a batshit compiler that compiles IL to C++ for better performance, I guess.

sidenote, I wonder how many other low-level to high-level compilers exist out there. can't be many.

AFAIK, the original reason to build IL2CPP was to appease console certification and leave behind Mono's quirky AOT on iOS. Capcom is also using their own C# implementation targeting C++ for console certification.

Allegedly some games are now managing to ship on console with ports of .NET NativeAOT.

I agree Mono is bad compared to upstream .NET, but I used to write game prototypes with it back before .NET Core without as many performance issues as I still find in Unity. It was doable with a different mindset.

> The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point.

Respectfully, it doesn't prove your point. Unity is a commercial product that employed C# because they could sell it easily, not because it's the best language for game dev.

Godot supports C# because Microsoft sponsored the maintainers precisely on that condition.

> The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point.

Popularity is not proof of anything. C# is popular because it’s made by Microsoft and rode the OOP hype.

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