The D Programming Language

Published on 17 March 2019 (Updated: 02 May 2020)

The D Programming Language

If you haven’t heard of D, I’m hardly surprised. After all, it’s not exactly a popular language. In fact, it currently ranks 39th by popularity on GitHub. For reference, languages ahead of D include Visual Basic .NET (31st), Haskell (21st), Swift (18th), and C (8th). Meanwhile, D sits narrowly ahead of newer languages like Julia (43rd) and Elixir (45th).

That said, according to Wikipedia, D is still a pretty interesting language. As you can probably imagine, D is supposed to be an improvement on C++. Apparently, the designers weren’t a fan of the practical issues surrounding C++ (surprise, surprise!). As a result, D includes features like design by contract, garbage collection, associative arrays, array slicing, and lazy evaluation.

Perhaps the most interesting feature to me has to be the inline assembler. Apparently, developers can write assembly code directly in D source code:

void *pc;
asm
{
    pop  EBX         ;
    mov  pc[EBP], EBX ; 
}

By adding an asm block, developers can quickly tap into the hardware with assembly code. Now, I think that is a pretty cool programming language feature.

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