D is an incredibly fun language with a reasonable syntax and considerable support for a wide variety of programming paradigms (procedural, object oriented, functional…), while maintaining binary interface compatibility with C and C++. That makes it extremely versatile.
It is the perfect pet language. The only reason it was never more widely adopted is the quizzical early decision by its makers (Mars) to keep the reference compiler closed source. There an open source compiler too, and it’s good, but it’s effectively black boxing. So, pet language is where the buck stopped, for better or worse.
D is an incredibly fun language with a reasonable syntax and considerable support for a wide variety of programming paradigms (procedural, object oriented, functional…), while maintaining binary interface compatibility with C and C++. That makes it extremely versatile.
It is the perfect pet language. The only reason it was never more widely adopted is the quizzical early decision by its makers (Mars) to keep the reference compiler closed source. There an open source compiler too, and it’s good, but it’s effectively black boxing. So, pet language is where the buck stopped, for better or worse.
Is it still closed source? What is the reason?!
I think it is Open Source now, see https://github.com/dlang/dmd
AFAIK the backend is based on the Zortech C/C++ backend and Walter Bright had to get permission from Symantec to relicence as Open Source.
I see, makes sense.
No idea what the reason was, likely misunderstanding from upper management. I’m not sure going open would make much of a difference at this point
Yeah, C# and Rust, in their own ways, pretty much covered what D lang set out to do.
C# was the solution, we didn’t yet know that we needed, to Java.