Item — HN Reader

Good artists copy but great artists steal :-)

Joking aside, it's funny that Bjarne did not talk about D since it seems that C++ is copying many of D nice features in later of C++ iterations for over a decade now.

And now D is copying the Rust/Cyclone ownership concept, nice!

3 comments

People in the D community like to think that, but stuff like ranges is older than D, born out FP languages research and even Smalltalk had them on its collection types, then auto for type inference was already there in C with Classes, just Bjarne faced too much opposition back in the 80's.

I'm honestly wondering why he explicitly mentioned it.

Languages taking inspiration from other languages and that's normal I don't think anyone bm the people I know from the rust community (which e.g. work on the compiler and language) would do so.

That's except if you write something like a paper, in which case it's party of the proper proceeding to mention "priority art" you are aware of *even if you didn't copy it or even had the idea early but just didn't publish it.

I hope it's just some random thing he remembered thought of when causally doing the interview, because the other alternatives wouldn't make him look good.

Admitting that D even exists should embarrass the C++ committee.

Modules and contracts have taken something like 30 years combined, and they still aren't prevalent. The tried to borrow static if, but theirs is scoped and misses the point (the static if paper).

All of the aforementioned are maintained in a language that has less maintainers than C++ has committee members, with better solutions and orders of magnitude faster compile time.

Why should it? At least ISO C++ knows what they want, while D is still trying to find out to which community they should be advertising to.

I find many of the people on their forums quite nice, but D lacks a profound sense of direction and which market they want to target.

Filling multiple roles is not the same as lack of direction. D does lack direction, but that's arguably a good thing - that's why the scripting-like features can exist alongside the features which are intended for writing high performance code.

The fact that C++ is only used for performance is due to C++ being a bad language everywhere else rather than being amazing at writing high performance code. How many hours of developer productivity have been lost to slow compiles and bad metaprogramming (traits, contracts, and constexpr are emblematic of the half in half out C++ way)

Might be, but right now I don't see D ever taking off, rather going on the down slope of adoption curve, while C++ despite its warts, keeps increasing adoption thanks to AI, GPGPU shaders and driver SDKs for all major OSes.

By the way no one at Remedy is using D nowadays, while the number of studios using C# alongside C++ keeps increasing.