It was also commercial and closed source in it's early years wasn't it? I don't think there is a place for commercial compilers anymore.
D was always Open Source and free as in beer. It was not Free Software, which is a problem for inclusion in Debian main et al. You get the package from a third-party repo.
The reference compiler backend is still only free as in beer, so there seems to be no way to include "DMD" in Debian. However, LDC (reference frontend + LLVM backend) is practically in sync with DMD today.
The advantage of DMD is faster compilation. LDC gives you faster programs. So, for development I prefer DMD for the faster iteration.
Was it restriction free or did it have limitations on things like stack size like a lot of commercial compilers did?
No restrictions. There was nothing you could pay for in D.
The backend comes from the Digital Mars C++ compiler, which is/was commercial. That is probably the source of the confusion.
Re:Rust vs. Go
by tonyedgecombe on Thursday January 19, 2017 @03:31AM
(#13434094)
It will be a shame if that's the case.
Why is that? History with commercial compilers have shown them to create nothing but vendor lock-in.
Re:Rust vs. Go
by tonyedgecombe on Friday January 20, 2017 @06:38AM
(#13443086)
More choice, I don't want an open source mono-culture.
During the last year the D foundation was founded and is spinning up operations. The 2016 D conference had a visitor record again with over 100 people. Downloads are growing over the years [0]. The package manager dub is now fully integrated. You can find success stories on the blog [1] and companies using it [2]. There are books.
[0] http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png [1] https://dlang.org/blog/ [2] https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html