Asynchronous I/O that doesn’t get in your way, written in D

Re:Asynchronous I/O that doesn’t get in your way, written in D by danford on Monday May 26, 2014 @08:07AM (#7799409)

Does anyone know if googles V8 could benefit from being re-written (even partly) in D? I'm mostly a web programmer and only just started learning D, so I'm not real familiar with how these lower level languages work. It seems like C++ programmers openly admit that D is better than C++ in many ways, but because of the lack of documentation (which seems to be a little better as of late) it just isn't a viable solution for most projects.

I'd like to hear an unbiased opinion of whether D, assuming the proper docs were available, could replace the C++ code in V8, and if not, what exactly is holding it back?

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Re:Asynchronous I/O that doesn’t get in your way, written in D by simendsjo on Monday May 26, 2014 @08:13AM (#7799422)

Not answering your question, but there is a research project implementing a Javascript JIT compiler in D: http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/higgs/

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Re:Asynchronous I/O that doesn’t get in your way, written in D by nly on Monday May 26, 2014 @08:23PM (#7802270)

As far as I've ever seen, Google have no particular interest in D. Facebook have expressed quite a bit of support, but Google just have a way of doing there own thing (Dart, Go, forking WebKit etc). Another problem with Google is that they're fickle, fragmented, and known for crappy support.

> It seems like C++ programmers openly admit that D is better than C++ in many ways.

Anecdotally, I've not seen this. The vibe I've picked up on over the years seems to be that D is and was always seen as a cleaner, but slightly less powerful, C++ with a lot of potential... but now C++ standardisation has accelerated, there's just much more comfort amongst C++ devs that the language looking forward is good. C++ is almost as old as C and evolving faster than ever. If anything though, Rust seems to be the serious topic of choice atm.

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Re:Asynchronous I/O that doesn’t get in your way, written in D by keeperofdakeys on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @11:48AM (#7805048)

As a language, C++ is used in many different niches, because it allows such low-level control of the machine. However it has many problems around the edges, because it was essentially hacked ontop of C. D is designed to get around these problems, and provide a better OOP langauge. So it lacks some low-level control that C++ has, which you require for for a JIT, which is used in V8. So you'd want to stick with C or C++ for something like V8.

There are also two other recent languages designed to replace niches of C++: Go in latency-sensitive, real time systems, and Rust in systems programming. Rust is quite interesting though, since it introduces many data-safety concepts from function programming into an imperative language.

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Re:Asynchronous I/O that doesn’t get in your way, written in D by camus2 on Monday May 26, 2014 @08:11AM (#7799418)

> what exactly is holding it back?

the size and the complexity of V8 codebase.

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