The One With D News and Opinions of the Digital Mars D Programming Language

Introducing D

If you've been around C++ for a while, you may remember the Zortech C++ compiler. The man behind the Zortech compiler was Walter Bright. Now, Walter runs a company called Digital Mars. He's still in the business of C & C++ compilers, but he also has a new baby - D.

Rather than try to explain in my own words what D is, I'll use Walter's:

D is a general purpose systems and applications programming language. It is a higher level language than C++, but retains the ability to write high performance code and interface directly with the operating system API's and with hardware. D is well suited to writing medium to large scale million line programs with teams of developers. D is easy to learn, provides many capabilities to aid the programmer, and is well suited to aggressive compiler optimization technology.

D is not a scripting language, nor an interpreted language. It doesn't come with a VM, a religion, or an overriding philosophy. It's a practical language for practical programmers who need to get the job done quickly, reliably, and leave behind maintainable, easy to understand code.

D is the culmination of decades of experience implementing compilers for many diverse languages, and attempting to construct large projects using those languages. D draws inspiration from those other languages (most especially C++) and tempers it with experience and real world practicality.

The above is taken from the overview page of the specification. If your interest is piqued, check out the entire overview for more information on why D was created and what problems it is meant to solve.

There are several projects under development with D. Many can be found at DSource.org, others are scattered around the web. In this blog I will try to colocate the latest D news along with my views and experiences with the language.

As of now, D is pre-1.0. Walter has been in bugfix mode for several months and there are still updates being made to the standard library. I encourage you to give it a spin and see what you think. Many of the regulars in the newsgroup come from C++ and/or Java backgrounds. They share the belief that D is the best of both worlds and then some. And the best part is, the community does have an impact on the direction of features for both the language and the compiler (though no new language features are being added for a 1.0 release unless they are huge, but 2.0 is wide open).

The reference implementation, DMD (Digital Mars D) is available on Windows and Linux. There is also an open source implementation being developed by David Friedman on top of the GCC toolset, GDC. It is available on Windows, Linux and Mac. If you are interested, follow the links from this site or visit the D newsgroups to learn more and see how you can contribute to the growing D community.