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. Andrei Alexandrescu joined the design and development effort in 2007. Though it originated as a re-engineering of C++, D is a profoundly different language —features of D can be considered streamlined and expanded-upon ideas from C++, however D also draws inspiration from other high-level programming languages, notably Java, Python, Ruby, C#, and Eiffel. D combines the performance and safety of compiled languages with the expressive power of modern dynamic and functional programming languages. Idiomatic D code is commonly as fast as equivalent C++ code, while also being shorter. The language as a whole is not memory-safe but includes optional attributes designed to guarantee memory safety of either subsets of or the whole program. Type inference, automatic memory management and syntactic sugar for common types allow faster development, while bounds checking and design by contract find bugs earlier at runtime, and a concurrency-aware type system catches bugs at compile time. D was designed with lessons learned from practical C++ usage, rather than from a purely theoretical perspective. Although the language uses many C and C++ concepts, it also discards some, or uses different approaches (and syntax) to achieve some goals. As such, it is not source compatible (nor does it aim to be) with C and C++ source code in general (some simpler code bases from these languages might by luck work with D, or require some porting). D has, however, been constrained in its design by the rule that any code that was legal in both C and D should behave in the same way. D gained some features before C++, such as closures, anonymous functions, compile-time function execution, ranges, built-in container iteration concepts and type inference. D adds to the functionality of C++ by also implementing design by contract, unit testing, true modules, garbage collection, first class arrays, associative arrays, dynamic arrays, array slicing, nested functions, lazy evaluation, scoped (deferred) code execution, and a re-engineered template syntax.