I've discovered D six years ago after reading Andrei Alexandreuscu's article "The Case for D" in one of ACCU's publications. D was a gasp of fresh air especially for people coming from C++ like myself.

I used to frequent C and C++ forums on Turkish web sites and was aware of the need for up-to-date software documentation. I saw D as an opportunity to ensure that for once, Turkish documentation would not be behind the English ones. I started writing HTML pages without any idea that they would become a book later on.

Then I've decided to use the tool Prince XML (free for personal use) to see the pages in book form. I made that PDF version available as well.

I had never thought that my work would be valuable for an English-speaking audience. Then, Andrei and others convinced me that it would be a good idea to translate the book to English as well. I did that, added many more chapters, edited heavily (mostly by Luís Marques), and it worked!

As far as I know, the book is the first software documentation that was translated from Turkish to English, as opposed to the other direction.

D is a general purpose language. I don't know the status on the IOS/Android front. gdc, the D compiler using GCC back-end; and ldc, the D compiler using LLVM back-end can produce code for the platforms that those compilers support. However, don't take my word on that. I would expect issues.

D is a compiled language that is as low as C (and of course inline assembly) and as high as Python and others. One benefit over Go is the fact that D's template support is the best that I know of. When compared to D's C++'s templates are almost unusable; very clumsy.

Ali

Advantages compared to ...

Go: Generic type-safe highly efficient code. Can go lower-level like inline assembly. Can go higher-level because more meta programming.

Python: Faster. Static typing.

Ruby: See Python.

Java: Less boilerplate. More control over memory management. More meta programming. Natively compiled.

Rust: Easier. Garbage collection makes programming just as safe and is easier to use. Looks and feels more like C/C++/Java, if you already know them. More meta programming.

(of course, downsides of D are omitted ;)

Rust's safety is not limited to memory safety; you get data race freedom too. But the memory safety is the same (assuming you opt into SafeD).

Java is also native compiled. Language != Implementation.

OpenJDK is only the reference implementation. There are plenty of commercial implementations with AOT compilers.

Edit: did not write != properly

Yes, but it shows that the language was designed for interpretation. E.g. lazy static initializers is weird in AOT compilation.

It is not weird in functional programming languages.

I think you misunderstood me, because I used "lazy". It has nothing to do with Haskell lazyness.

In Java static fields are initialized when a class is loaded by the class loader. A class is only loaded when used. If anything (IO,scheduler,etc) changes the order in which classes are used, then initializers are called in a different order and their side effects as well. This semantic is mandatory by language definition.

In a Java AOT compiler this means every access to a static field must be prefixed with a (synchronized) check if the class is already initialized and optimizing it away is rarely possible. A JIT compiler does not even care, because it knows the class is already loaded.

For contrast, in C++ static fields are all initialized before main is called.

Actually I don't know how the current AOT compilers approach that situation.

Now with Oracle taking the steps to eventually make AOT compilation also a feature in the reference JDK, I suppose whatever issues might still exist they will be tackled.

Can you expand on the downside part of D?

Downsides compared to ...

All of them: Language is more complex and takes longer to learn. Less community. Less libraries.

Python: D cannot be as close to pseudo code, mostly due to static types.

Rust: Borrow checking looks like a nice idea. The question is, if the cost is worth it.

As a language, I think D is clearly better than Java and Go. Go has better tooling. For example, go-fmt is production quality, while dfmt is alpha quality.

> Can we use dlang to build IOS/Android apps?

It's a work in progress, but simple things are possible.

https://github.com/smolt/ldc-iphone-dev http://wiki.dlang.org/GDC/Installation/Android

FWIW, I installed Debian on my Android phone, on which I installed GDC. Building and running D programs just worked.