Probably Dance

Garbage collection is a red flag for any C++ programmer, simply because a garbage collector makes it more difficult to use the language for the kinds of things that C++ programmers like to program.

When I started programming in D, I was going to give the garbage collector the benefit of the doubt. The language has enough smart features that I figured that the designers must have had good reasons for including a GC.

But really, it’s a mess. In fact it’s a bigger mess than I have seen in other garbage collected languages. Fortunately that mess is solvable, and where it isn’t solvable the language designers could probably make it less of a problem.

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D is better than C++ in many ways. Here are a couple examples that I have encountered so far.

Let’s start with the scope keyword:

void main()
{
    OSInterface.Load();
    scope(exit) OSInterface.Quit();
    //...
}

What this means is “at the end of the current scope, run OSInterface.Quit();. Meaning I can put the call to freeing resources right next to the line where I allocate it. There is also scope(failure) which only runs the when there is an exception, and scope(success) which only runs when the scope exits normally. This is a much better solution than try {} catch {} finally {}.

Another cool thing is lazy evaluation, for example in the function std.exception.enforce, which has this signature:

T enforce(T)(T value, lazy const(char)[] msg = null, string file = __FILE__, size_t line = __LINE__)

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I am learning the D programming language.

I’m a C++ programmer, and like most C++ programmers I am rather annoyed with C++. It can be a pretty bad language. The problem is only that all other languages are even worse for the stuff that you’d want to use C++ for.

But D seems promising. Reading through the features of the language, you notice that it has many smart solutions for things which are cumbersome or error-prone in C++. I’ll go into benefits and problems of features one by one as I am using them. But the D overview page says under “Who D is for:”

• Programmers who routinely use lint or similar code analysis tools to eliminate bugs before the code is even compiled.
• People who compile with maximum warning levels turned on and who instruct the compiler to treat warnings as errors.

Which sounds like me, or at least sounds like the programmer I wish I was.

But to start, you just want a simple “Hello, World” on the screen. And that already is kinda complicated in D.

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