D is a great "systems language", but Walter is marketing it wrong: he should have catered to influential and growing community of C/Linux devs, as opposed to dying breed of corporate drones who do C++/Windows. I have been one of those drones myself, and they aren't interested: they're moving to C#/.NET. DigitalMars does not even have a typical Linux-friendly download, instead there is a zip with mixed bag of Win/Linux binaries, WTF?

The name sucks too: it's not search engine friendly, try googling for "exceptions in D" for instance.

Sorry for the rant. I just want D to succeed.

It's certainly a step up from C++ or Java. Notably, it has anonymous functions and lexical closures. I'm not a big fan of static typing though, especially with explicit type declarations, but I'd certainly like to see D replace C++.

If speed is a concern, everybody's favorite language benchmark[0] shows D being about 20% slower than GCC. Within 100% of GCC are implementations of ML, Ocaml, Haskell, Common Lisp and Scala.

So what should you use if you want speed with your power? My first recommendation would be a good profiler.

[0] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...

That's the Digital Mars D compiler being benchmarked. I bet the GDC compiler is really, really close to GCC's performance since it uses the same optimizers and backend.

I think it's within 20%.

If Paul and Walter could merge their two efforts, we would have a programming language called "DArc".

I'm planning to use C++ and Python for my startup this year. It's a little interesting to think about using D and Arc instead.

There's a D book out (finally): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100391

Is anyone here actually using it for anything?

I'm picking it up now for one my company's products. We're doing some encoding that integrates extant C headers; I figured this would be a great time to pick up D.

What does it give you that Ruby doesn't?

That remains to be seen. I'm doing some pretty hardcore video encoding and processing that will use and extend some existing C libraries. I was tempted to just use the FFI to call them from Ruby (which I still may end up doing), but I figured that this is a great chance to test-drive D.

Sounds like your working along the lines that I am, except I am using (gasp) c++. Are you doing H.264/263 or some custom stuff?

Interesting. My stuff is pretty niche and custom. No H.264 for me. :)

Compilation of your applications to binary for one. Also, it enables you to do the bit twiddling necessary to write device drivers and other lovely systems programming things. Maybe we'll see a better scripting language VM in D one of these days?