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 (19 chapters)
Learning D
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Tools and utilities


Throughout the book we've been using DMD to compile examples and DUB to manage the MovieMan project. Now it's time to look at some additional tools that can be part of a productive D workflow. The first tool on the list, though, is actually DMD. We're going to take a look at some of the compiler options that can be helpful during the development of D programs.

DMD

Thus far, we haven't used many options when compiling D programs, but there are quite a few of them. As demonstrated in Chapter 1, How to Get a D in Programming, the list of compiler options can be displayed by invoking DMD with no command-line options. Each option is accompanied by a brief description of what it does. Here are a few of those that you may find most useful.

Optimized and debug builds

There are a few DMD options that control optimizations and debugging. The -g switch adds debugging information in a D-specific format. For debuggers that don't support D debug symbols, -gc can be used to make the compiler...