What is the D programming language?
D (also known as Dlang) is a multi-paradigm system programming language created by Walter Bright at Digital Mars and released in 2001. D combines a wide range of powerful programming concepts from the lowest levels to the highest. It emphasizes memory safety, program correctness, and pragmatism.
Some key benefits of D are outlined below.
Multi-paradigm language
D comes with multiple paradigms:
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Concurrent programming: has language constructs for concurrency, these may involve multi-threading, etc.
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Functional programming: uses the evaluation of mathematical functions and is capable of avoiding state and mutable data.
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Meta programming: writing programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as their data.
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Generic programming: uses algorithms written in terms of to-be-specified-later types that are then instantiated as needed-for- specific-types provided as parameters.
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Imperative programming: explicit statements that change a program state.
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Object-oriented programming: uses data structures, that consist of data fields and methods, together with their interactions (objects) to design programs.
Memory safety and management
D does not require explicit memory management. It has a garbage collector that scans the memory at unspecified times, determines the objects that cannot possibly be reached by the program anymore, destroys them, and reclaims their memory locations.
Productivity
D helps to increase productivity by providing features such as:
- Modules
- Templates
- Associative arrays
- Documentation
Performance and reliability
D is a highly reliable, high-performance language; thus, it allows the programmer to write and compile codes faster and without any bugs. It achieves this by:
- Lightweight aggregates
- Inline assembler
- Contracts
- Unit testing
- Debug attributes and statements
- Exception handling
- Synchronization
Basic example
The following example shows how to print “Hello World” in D.
import std.stdio;void main() {writeln("Hello World!");}
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