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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how many people out there on HN actully use D and what for? I don't typically see D based projects here on HN so it would be interesting to find out about any use cases where D was found a perfect fit.

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I use D for ... almost everything. https://github.com/CyberShadow?tab=repositories

Here's a bit of code from a personal shopping comparison program I wrote a few days ago, which combines some standard library constructs with my own libraries:

  string findProduct(string name)
  {
      return
          ("http://www.tp-link.com/en/search/?q=" ~ encodeComponent(name))
          .download
          .readText
          .toXML
          .xmlParse
          .I!(doc => zip(
              doc
              .findAll("#productResult > li > dl > dt > a")
              .map!(e => e.attributes["href"])
          ,    
              doc
              .findAll("#productResult > li > dl > dt > a")
              .map!(e => e.children[$-1].text.strip)
          ))
          .filter!(t => !icmp(t[1], name))
          .I!(r => r.empty ? null : "http://www.tp-link.com" ~ r.front[0])
      ;
  }

I know your projects! You made RABCDasm, which is used extensively on a certain game I used to play around in, people are still using it. Hah, I mostly asked this question because I was reminded of you, you're one of the first developers I saw who does most of their work in D.

Thanks for all your hard work, there's people out there who really found RABCDAsm really helpful, and it inspired a lot of fun software in the process.

Ah, thank you! Long live game modding ;)

95% of the code I work on is D.

D fits lots of purposes (more than C++), but I'm only going to talk about scripting.

The minimalistic approach for the C++ standard library makes C++ inappropriate to replace, for example, Bash scripts. In C++, you can't do any operation on the file system (erase a directory, get file size, list files, create pipes, ..) in a portable way. You can't create processes in a portable way.

The D standard library (aka Phobos) doesn't suffer these limitations. Which means you can write very high-level code using only a few (readable) lines. By adding a shebang "#!/usr/bin/env rdmd" at the beginning of your D programs, you can execute them without prior explicit compilation, like: ./myProgram.d

I've been porting all my Bash scripts to D. The code runs incredibly faster, and now I can have structs again!

We (AdRoll) use it for performance-sensitive machine learning:

http://tech.adroll.com/blog/data/2014/11/17/d-is-for-data-sc...

Nice, thanks for the blog post.

Facebook uses Warp[1] as a fast replacement for the c/c++ preprocessor.

[1]https://github.com/facebook/warp

This is an interesting one: https://github.com/prestodb/presto-odbc But I am not sure whether D is a perfect fit here though.

WalterBright uses it in his compiler.

He's a little more involved in D than using it in his compiler :)

>WalterBright uses it in his compiler.

Ironically, the dmd compiler is written in C++.

D didn't exist when the dmd compiler was written. But Daniel Murphy has written a C++ to D converter, and it's looking like the next release will have dmd written in D.

>it's looking like the next release will have dmd written in D.

Is that going to make it trickier for GDC/LDC to stay in sync with DMD? (Either way, it's exciting news!)

Tricky or not, they're on board with the jump.

How will you then bootstrap it on new platforms? Will it become reliant on cross compilation for bootstrap?

Where is ?

It's being replaced this year by a D version.

What I'd particularly like to see is an analysis of D vs. Rust. Both have been touted as systems programming languages to replace C/C++, and I'd be curious to see a breakdown of their strengths and weaknesses compared to each other.

It would take an expert in both languages to do it. My knowledge of Rust is fairly limited. In particular, every language has its own idiomatic way of doing things (the D Way, the Rust Way), and to compare one has to be cognizant of those idioms.

I did some hobby stuff with it. But I'm afraid that I didn't use it for real stuff. A few weeks ago I try to use it to write a tool to update our Java webservices from the latest Maven deploy (I'm afraid that I work as Java programmer :( ). Sadly I got issues with linking against std.net.curl , and I end writing a bash script for that.

I really enjoy a lot more writing on D, but I keep finding the issue that I need to interface with C++ libs for something (for example Qt 5 for an emulator GUI) or weird errors like these problem with std.net.curl on Ubuntu 14.04 . If not was for that, I would wrote the Trillek virtual computer on D.

Did you consider their wiki page on GUI Libraries?

http://wiki.dlang.org/GUI_Libraries

Just thought I'd share, maybe you overlooked it and this might be helpful for future projects? Good luck!

I know and try GtkD (https://github.com/Zardoz89/DEDCPU-16). It's fancy, but at the end you would find that you are always trying to do a mental map between the Gtk documentation and how this is translated to D. Plus is Gtk.

Also, I played a few with Qt 5 on C++... I would like to have updated binding of Qt for D. qtd and dqt looks that are abandoned. :S

DQuick looks interesting, perhaps I would rewrite my fontmap editor with it.

PD: If I look that I hate a bit Gtk, I would only say that with buggy graphics drivers (ie ATI/AMD cards on Linux), Gtk usually have horrible graphical glitches, when Qt simply works fine.

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