Bulldozer00's Blog

The editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Andrew Binstock, has put together a nice little slideshow summary of four “modern” native (native = no virtual machine running underneath the code) programming languages here: New Native Languages. As the figure below shows, these relatively new languages are D, Go, Vala, and Rust.

According to Andy, “older” native languages like C11 and C++11 “can have the feel of a past era onto which contemporary elements have been grafted“. I don’t agree with his “grafted” assertion, but I have to begrudgingly agree with him when he says:

The upshot is that to be truly expert in C++ requires far more education and far more effort than comparable mainstream OO languages (notably, Java and C#). – Andrew Binstock

Since I have much admiration for “D” creator Walter Bright and co-evolver Andrei Alexandrescu, I’ve been following the evolution of their language from afar. These two guys really know C++ inside and out; warts and all. Thus, unlike the 1995 Sun marketing proclamation that “Java is what C++ should have been“, Walter and Andrei are truly evolving D into “what C++ should be” – which is not just an OO language. Plus, they are being very gracious about it.