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Andrei Alexandrescu's answer to Which language has the brightest future in replacement of C between D, Go and Rust? And Why?
Andrei Alexandrescu compares D, Go, and Rust as candidates to replace C and also C++. He argues that each language has strong advantages, but its future depends on whether it can use those strengths well and deal with adoption, performance, design, and positioning problems.
Reading notes#
- D is presented as technically strong but held back by poor adoption, an unclear relationship to garbage collection, and weak long-term vision.
- D’s advantages are fast compilation, speed over scripting languages for similar convenience, easy interoperability with C and C++, and strong support for generic and generative programming.
- Go is criticized for indirect calls and garbage collection, rigid technical politics, and a simplicity that can make code repetitive and hard to extend.
- Go’s strengths are described as its focus on networking services, the quality of its engineering team, and the branding value of its link to Google.
- Rust is described as having a strong focus on safe memory management and a different syntax that can feel foreign to programmers from Algol-style languages.
- Rust’s strengths are its theorists, its safety story for systems programming, and its strong early community hype and PR.
- The closing claim is that replacement of C or C++ will depend on how well these languages exploit their strengths and solve their weaknesses.
