Hacker News Reader

Comment by istvan__ | Hacker News Reader

Could somebody redpill me on why something like D (http://dlang.org/) is not a better alternative to C++. Is that the library support or what exactly makes C++ still a better option in 2015? I am not sure what is the best alternative to C++.

View on HN

When you develop something you consider not only the features of the language itself, but also the availability of libraries in this particular language. There is a large amount of high-quality C++ libraries and C++ can consume C libraries seamlessly. In most other languages you need to write often unsafe bindings to connect to C.

D simply doesn't have enough libraries to make it a viable choice except maybe for some niche area. For example, there are only 6k D repos on GitHub (https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=language%3AD&type...) compared with 340k C++ repos. Also any high-performance code (at least in the area I'm working) is written in C++ or, sometimes, in C.

Thanks for the answer this is exactly what I was looking for. It seems that C++ is in a sweet spot and it is going to be hard to challenge its position.

D is a better alternative for many people. Speaking of Scott Meyers, C++, and D, his talk at DConf 2014 was humorous and you'll get a better sense of him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48kP_Ssg2eY

It depends on your actual goals. Personally, though I prefer Go for everything when possible, my favorite alternative to C++ is C++. If you want a true alternative, Rust is probably a smarter investment of time compared to D, based on traction. However, I'm uninformed about the D community as of late, and certainly won't be surprised of a future surge.

Thanks this video is just too funny. I was aware of the quirkiness of C++ but this is very insightful.

On the Go note, I like it but I think the target of Go is system programming with great concurrency support. More about Go here: http://yager.io/programming/go.html

Rust seems to incorporate all of the academic research about programming languages and also moves towards memory safety and correctness, and that is a good start. See what happens in the next 10 years! :)

Scott is hilarious. He's a bundle of insight. The slight jest about C++ being an alternative to itself sums it up: it can be a multidimensional beast. Quirky is a very kind way to describe smashing one's head on a keyboard repeatedly. That said, C++11 changed its game. It's so much easier to write in it without inducing bleeding eye syndrome.

The Go article has some fair points. Yet, most of the reasons the author discounts Go are reasons I prefer Go. Its minimalism is a virtue. I'm grateful that it ignores a lot of research overload. It's grounding. I see more and do more in it. Reading people's code and the standard library itself isn't painful. Go is versatile. Systems don't sum it up. In my view, it'll have a healthy stride in a lot of other areas outside of networking and the web, given time (e.g. desktop GUIs, mobile, games, game servers, etc.). In 10 years, we'll have exhausted all letters and be back on C.

I am familiar with C++ and not familiar with D, but I have heard from people that D is not very practical without a garbage collector, so I suspect that D is not a good choice if you want to have memory allocation/deallocation in your own hands.

I loved D the last time I looked at it, but got tired of writing bindings / FFI code for all the libs I needed. Same thing with Lisp.

I don't want to use your arbitrarily opinionated bindings, and I don't want to have to write my own just to get started.

The language itself is amazing. I'm a fan.

But try to find a MySQL library with support for DECIMAL. Something I think should be in the standard library nowadays.

No workable solution found.

Things like that are the things that kill the language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com