Re:DConf 2019 in London
by vaylian on Friday February 15, 2019 @09:03AM
(#19170958)
I am not completely up to date with D at the moment, but I hope the following is still accurate:
Both D and Rust are fast when it comes to run time. Rust is more explicit about allocations because of the borrow checker. A typical case is string handling. In D you do not need to think much about gluing strings together. In Rust, you have to use more explicit code to say: Yes, I really want the extra allocation.
Rust makes you more conscious about lifetimes. That can be a good thing. You will get better runtime performance, but I also think that it promotes simplicity which in turn makes it easier to understand the code in the future (every variable has a clear owner).
D gives you speed with a pleasant syntax. Rust gives you robustness and the language-design of a community. D's design addresses the unsafety of C and C++ and makes it a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot. Not as hard as Rust, but pretty hard.
Rust feels much more like a universal language, that not only focuses on the niche of C and C++. D has a clear focus on the C/C++ world, but it is still a suitable language for scripting. I used it a while instead of Python to write file processing scripts. Why did I stop doing this? Mostly because I moved to a new place that was very biases towards Python. I did not think much about it back then but I could probably have kept writing D.
Both are good languages. I think Rust is still more difficult to pick up, but the learning resources are getting better every day. If you want to use one of the two languages in a project with a team that is unfamiliar with both languages, D is probably the safer choice unless you have very strong reliability requirements.
I think both languages are worth learning. And both are good choices in the domain of C and C++.
Both D and Rust are fast when it comes to run time. Rust is more explicit about allocations because of the borrow checker. A typical case is string handling. In D you do not need to think much about gluing strings together. In Rust, you have to use more explicit code to say: Yes, I really want the extra allocation.
Rust makes you more conscious about lifetimes. That can be a good thing. You will get better runtime performance, but I also think that it promotes simplicity which in turn makes it easier to understand the code in the future (every variable has a clear owner).
D gives you speed with a pleasant syntax. Rust gives you robustness and the language-design of a community. D's design addresses the unsafety of C and C++ and makes it a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot. Not as hard as Rust, but pretty hard.
Rust feels much more like a universal language, that not only focuses on the niche of C and C++. D has a clear focus on the C/C++ world, but it is still a suitable language for scripting. I used it a while instead of Python to write file processing scripts. Why did I stop doing this? Mostly because I moved to a new place that was very biases towards Python. I did not think much about it back then but I could probably have kept writing D.
Both are good languages. I think Rust is still more difficult to pick up, but the learning resources are getting better every day. If you want to use one of the two languages in a project with a team that is unfamiliar with both languages, D is probably the safer choice unless you have very strong reliability requirements.
I think both languages are worth learning. And both are good choices in the domain of C and C++.