D

The D language was conceived and written by Walter Bright, whose experience in authoring C/C++ compilers and programming in those languages led him to identify a need for a language that retained most of the power and elegance of C/C++, whilst simplifying or discarding features that had become arcane or obsolete.

D occupies a niche somewhere between C++ and strictly object-oriented languages such as Java. As in C++, the developer has a choice between writing code in a modern object-oriented style or a traditional "function and data" style. Inline assembler and pointers are both supported and it is possible to compile D to native code. Like Java, the D language has built-in strings, does array bounds checking and can release memory via garbage collection. D source code can also be self-documenting insofar as it can be embedded in an HTML file, allowing the programmer to incorporate hyperlinks and formatting, which are ignored by the D compiler, but which make the source code browsable.

Related links on the internet

Digital Mars

Home of the Digital Mars C and C++ compilers for DOS and Windows, as well as the D language and DMDScript.

D Documentation

Online documentation of the D programming language, covering all aspects of the language as well as instructions on how to port existing C/C++ code. This documentation is available for download as part of the D compiler package.

The D Programming Language

Article by Walter Bright from "Dr. Dobb's Journal" of February 2002, outlining the rationale behind the D language and describing some of its key features.

The Code Moon - D Language Page

An ongoing chronicle of one developer's experiences with the D language.

DedicateD

Pavel Minayev's D site, containing a downloads section that has complete or partial ports of several APIs into D import modules.

OpenD.org

A site dedicated to creating a fully open source version of D by hooking the open source D frontend to the Gnu GCC compiler.

The D Language Wiki

The D language makes it to the Wiki. At time of writing (March 2003), this Wiki entry is not very expansive, perhaps reflecting the alpha state of D, but the nature of the Wiki is to evolve, so by the time you read this it could be worth a look.