D Programming Language in the real world? [closed]

Answer 1

I'm using D for my research work in the area of computer graphics. I and others have had papers published in our fields based on work done using D. I think it's definitely ready for use on small to medium sized research projects where performance matters. It's a nice fit for research work because often you're starting from scratch anyway, so you don't have much legacy code to worry about integrating with.

Another popular area for use seems to be web services. Hopefully someone else can comment who's in this space, but there too I think the idea is that performance often really matters so you want a compiled-to-the-metal language. Services are often fairly small, self-contained processes, so interop with large amounts of legacy C++ code is not really necessary or useful. Thus D can get its foot in the door.

I think D will continue to gain grass-roots followers in this way -- on smaller projects that for whatever reason can afford to ditch the C++ legacy in order to gain a programming language that's much more enjoyable to use, and perhaps more productive too.

But until there's a huge number of grass-roots users there won't be much in the way of big corporate users I suspect.

Answer 2

I started a ray-traced renderer in D with ldmd2.

http://palaes.rudanium.org/SubSpace/render.php

Answer 3

I know of one smallish company that have sent a mail server product to the market. They had at least 2 people working full time on the project.

Also, a major player in the IT business have several employees using D in larger internal projects.

Further I know of one company seeking venture funding, several (at least 4) employees in smaller companies using D either part or full time, and at least a couple (including me) actively seeking opportunities in the consulting market.

I've probably left out a few that I should have known about, and probably some I haven't heard about, but that still exists, as the above is more or less those I know myself via the community.

A small percentage of my current income comes from D.

Answer 4

I use D for web development and it proved quite a lot more productive compared to C/C++. There are a lot of frameworks based on ruby/php/python, of course. But when you want to develop something unique that also have to be as fast as C and nearly as easy as to program with as you do in many script languages, then D is a good choice.

Answer 5

My current work task is a system to translate C# to D. This is as part of a for profit project to develop a software system.

Answer 6

I suppose we can read something into the lack of immediate answers to this question and that is that not many/any of the acive stackoverflow responders are using D. I was also a little surprised about the level of its ranking in the TIOBE listing that you link to.

Having said that, Walter Bright has been working on the language for quite a number of years now and I think he has quite a number of `followers' who remember what a good job he did with the Zortech C++ compiler back in the '90s. I also note that the language appears to be leaning towards the functional direction now.