programming language D

The D programming language is a system programming language realized by Walter Bright since December 1999. A first stable version was released on January 3, 2007 with version 1.0. Currently there is the version 2.03, however with the status alpha. Thereby "D" is meant as successor of the programming language C, and is available under Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, SkyOS and Solaris.

Programming language D leans in the syntax strongly on C/C++, and also the standard library of "C" was integrated into "D". The compatibility given by it refers however expressly only to the programming language C; for C++ this does not apply again. "D" takes over however some concepts of C/C++ like e.g. the structured and object-oriented programming, Templates and overloading of operators. Other constructs however like multiple inheritance, extensive implicit type conversion were not integrated into D. The development of D was also supported by mechanisms of the languagesJava and C-Sharp (C#). Here mainly delegates, templates mixins and garbage collection are used.

There are currently two compilers for "D" : The official Digital Mars D compiler( DMD) by Walter Bright and the front-end GNU D compiler (GDC) for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). While the DMD compiler is only available for Windows and GNU-Linux, the free GDC compiler exists for practically all platforms on which a port of the GCC also exists. This includes, for example, FreeBSD, Solaris and Mac OS X. D code is translated by the compiler directly into machine code to generate the highest possible execution speed.

Due to its structure "D" is a very modern, imperative programming language, which supports both object-oriented programming with design patterns or metaprogramming, and can be used for very system-oriented developments by means of binary compatibility to C- ABI and inline assembler.

Manfred Hansen, Programming Language D,