Leancode

The opening talk of the first D Programming Language was given by Walter Bright, the designer of D, and Andrei Alexandrescu, the C++ guru who has been collaborating with Walter on some upcoming language features.

When Walt started working on D, everyone said “you can’t do a new language”, “it’s too big a project”, “the world is filled with half-implemented, poorly adopted langugages.”. He didn’t want this to become another one.

Walt felt he was in a good position to advance the state of the art, because he had been involved with C++ compiler construction for years, already had an optimizing C++ compiler, linker, etc. to build upon — and could focus work on making a front end that fixed the frustrations so many had with C++. After just getting a start on the project, its existence got outed on slashdot. And thus Walter was committed to make it into a real product.

This spring D saw its 1.0 release. And now, six years after the outing on slashdot, we have a a first conference with people from all over the world (well, 3 from outside the US) focused on the language.

Walt opened his talk by observing that with the momentum that has built — Simply, “D is here”. And proceeded into a great talk on upcoming language features. Highlights and notes coming in a future post.