[computer-go] Some beginner's questions concerning go bots

[Don Dailey]

Carter Cheng wrote:
> I have looked over the language specification for D and it has alot of nice features however the maturity issue is a big one for me and unless there is a huge gain in productivity I suspect I will stick to C++.
>   
For me there was a huge gain in productivity once I got over the initial 
learning curve.   I felt the documentation was rather weak and this 
didn't help.    Perhaps it's better now?   

I remember being quite surprised that a few minor things made such a 
difference.   For instance the simple for loop is not a major thing,  
but I find myself sighing every time I have to write:  for (i=0;  
i<LIMIT; i++) {   }    and you don't have to do this in D since it has a 
foreach type of loop (I forget the syntax.)    There were a few little 
things like this that seemed to make all the difference in the world, 
like being able to sort arrays without all the qsort scaffolding and 
having to deal with strings by passing pointers to low level string 
functions and so on.    All those things really added up.   

However, I must agree with you.   I too feel it is not quite mature and 
it should be just as fast as C if it were.   Many of the decisions the 
author (Walter Bright) made concerning D should make it more 
optimizable, and yet it's considerably slower than C.   It should be 
faster.    Even if it were pretty close I'm sure I would be programming 
in D right now.


- Don






> Admittedly C++ is not probably not the best language to prototype in and it would be nice to have something a bit more elegant/expressive (maybe something like SmallTalk-80/Squeak). I dont consider myself an expert C++ programmer by any means and alot of the aspects of the language I do still find a bit perplexing (I find Java easier but I do not think it's appropriate for a project which is primarily CPU/Memory bound).  
>
> Even if the compilation system is reasonably mature I sometimes worry about the library support. C/C++ has alot of nice libraries for handling a wide range of potential tasks and for the most part these days they have been bashed around enough to be certain that they work(I was recently burned by this on a project where the libraries should have been labelled some hacking required despite the fact that the compiler was quite mature).
>
> Thanks everyone for all the responses hopefully I can put them to go use.  
>
> Regards,
>
> Carter.
>
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