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Source for the D.NET Compiler is Now Available

by Jonathan Allen on May 15, 2009 |

D is a relatively new language that, like ObjectiveC, tries to address some of the more serious problems in C++. From our interview with Cristian Vlasceanu,

In many ways D encourages the "right" behavior. For example, in C and C++, if you write "int i;" the variable is uninitialized. To do the "right thing", the programmer needs to type extra keystrokes as in "int i = 0;" but D works the other way around: "int i;" safely sets the variable to a default value (that in this case is zero). To make it uninitialized you have to spend extra effort and type "int i = void;" expressing that the uninitialized variable is intentional and not due to laziness.

D.NET is an experimental port of the D language to the Common Language Runtime. It consists of two parts, a front-end and a back-end component. The front-end component handles the parsing of source code and the generation of abstract syntax trees. The back-end compiler takes that and generates the actual machine code, or in this case IL code. While the source for both are available on CodePlex, only the back-end is maintained there. The front-end component is straight out of the D 2.0 Programming Language Compiler.

A word of caution,

The back-end code is not of production quality, it is intended for research and educational purposes. The D Programming Language is a fairly complex language, and non-trivial features such as TLS and closures make it an interesting case study for generating IL code.

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D.NET Loses Something by Eric Smith Posted

D.NET Loses Something by Eric Smith

When I learned about D (and wrote a teeny bit of code with it) a few years back, it looked extremely interesting. Here was a language that was appropriate for native/system coding but that had features of more modern environments compared to C++, like garbage collection, unit testing and design by contract.

I'm not sure that a .NET targeted compiler is quite as compelling when compared to C#, but it would be cool to see D take off for cases when native code is more appropriate.