D's the Real Deal -- Finally

D is finally out da door and Walter Bright, D's developer, deserves a pat on da back. Several years in the offing (Walter first wrote about the language in "The D Programming Language" in the February 2002 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal), the official Version 1.0 was released just last week by Digital Mars, Walter's company.

So what is D? It is a freely available programming language that looks a lot like C/C++, but which eliminates features that make programs difficult to write, debug, test, and maintain. Those bad features are replaced by good features that make it easier to do such tasks. In short, D's emphasis is on simple, understandable, and powerful syntax. In this vein, D focuses on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with, according to Walter, the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. All the while, paying special attention to quality assurance, portability and reliability.

There's a lot more to D than dat, however. D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It's multiparadigm, supporting imperative, object-oriented, and template metaprogramming styles. To see how it compares to languges such as C, C++, C#, and Java, see this chart.

There are currently two implementations, the Digital Mars DMD package for Win32 and x86 Linux, and the GCC D Compiler package for several platforms, including Windows and Mac OS X. Moreover, there's a large collection of D source code and projects are at dsource D's community site. In addition, DDJ and the late CUJ has published numerous articles on D, primarily via Matthew Wilson's long running column.

So congratulations Walter. A job well done.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 04:34 PM  Permalink