Book Image

Learning D

By : Michael Parker
Book Image

Learning D

By: Michael Parker

Overview of this book

D is a modern programming language that is both powerful and efficient. It combines multiple paradigms in a way that opens up a whole new world of software design. It is used to develop both desktop and web applications, with future targets including mobile, and is available on multiple platforms. It is familiar to anyone with some experience in one or more of the C-family languages. However, hidden in the similarities are several differences that can be surprising when trying to apply common idioms from other languages. When learning D on your own, this can make it more time-consuming to master. In order to make the most of the language and become an idiomatic D programmer, it’s necessary to learn how to think in D. This book familiarizes you with D from the ground up, with a heavy focus on helping you to avoid surprises so that you can take your D knowledge to the next level more quickly and painlessly. Your journey begins with a taste of the language and the basics of compiling D programs with DMD, the reference D compiler developed by Digital Mars, and DUB, a community-developed build utility and package manager. You then set out on an exploration of major language features. This begins with the fundamentals of D, including built-in types, conditionals, loops and all of the basic building-blocks of a D program, followed by an examination of D’s object-oriented programming support. You’ll learn how these features differ from languages you may already be familiar with. Next up are D’s compile-time features, such as Compile-Time Function Evaluation and conditional compilation, then generic programming with templates. After that, you’ll learn the more advanced features of ranges and functional pipeline programming. To enhance your D experience, you are next taken on a tour of the D ecosystem and learn how to make D interact with C. Finally, you get a look at D web development using the vibe.d project and the book closes with some handy advice on where to go next.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

The garbage collector


The GC has been a background presence throughout this book, occasionally coming to the fore when we discussed specific language and library features. For a large number of D programs, it is never necessary to interact directly with the GC. A programmer needs to be aware of when collection cycles may occur, how to write GC-free code with @nogc, and how to avoid the potential issues that may arise when using GC-managed memory with C libraries, but the need to get down and dirty with the GC API is rare. When those times do arise, the core.memory module comes into play.

In this module, you'll find a single structure, GC, which contains a number of static member functions. Automatic garbage collection can be turned off with GC.disable. This doesn't turn off the GC completely—it will still run when the system is out of memory—but it does prevent it from running during normal usage. Collection can be forced by calling GC.collect. There have been reports of significant performance...