After not being too impressed with Go, I thought I’ll give D a shot. So I went to the university library and got myself “The D programming language”. The book is quite great but I haven’t been able to write any single line of D code.

Because it is neigh-impossible to actually use D. The DMD compiler is not free software, so this thing is out immediately. I don’t plan to use a language with only a proprietary compiler. LDC doesn’t seem to care much about ARM (see Raspberry Pi) and GDC missed inclusion for GCC yet again (and the GDC instructions for Raspbian are awful).

Contrast that with Go. After it got released, a gcc-go frontend got included into GCC 4.7. Also, the Go compiler can be built easily on a Raspberry Pi. I can install Go on my Arch Linux without problems as well as about any other relevant platform.

Whereas D struggles for years.