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The D language, long an underdog among programmers, got a significant boost this past week when its developers received permission to relicense its reference compiler as an open source project. <\/p>\n
DMD, the reference compiler for D, has been encumbered by legacy licensing, courtesy of Symantec. The license made it problematic to distribute the compiler in conjunction with other open source software -- for instance, in a Linux distribution -- and often sparked confusion about what it permitted. <\/p>\n
All that changed when Symantec finally gave permission to allow DMD to be relicensed under the highly permissive Boost License. <\/p>\n
Two other open source D compilers exist, GDC and LDC, but both have typically lagged in terms of their feature support for the language. <\/p>\n
DMD's licensing is one likely reason why the D language, originally created as an evolutionary expansion of C\/C++, has not enjoyed wider adoption. Most other recently created languages, such as Go and Rust, have their reference implementations available as open source projects. <\/p>\n
Supporters of D cite many features that put it in the same class as Rust and Go in terms of convenience and safety: fast compilation times, garbage-collected memory management (with manual memory management also available), and strong interoperation with C\/C++. But it stands out thanks to its static introspection functions and code-generation features, which allow compile-time optimizations that would be difficult in other languages. <\/p>\n
Freeing up DMD means one fewer obstacle to wider acceptance of D, but not automatically so. D co-creator Andrei Alexandrescu has cited three key obstacles D would need to overcome: How its use of garbage collection by default alienated many C\/C++ programmers, its \"historical lack of vision,\" and the fact that it remains minimally used though it's been around for years. Relicensing DMD can address the first of those by allowing a broader base of developers to build more standard-library additions that don't depend exclusively on D's garbage-collected memory management. <\/p>\n
But D also faces strong competition from other languages. Much of the potential user base for D may already have made commitments to Rust and Go, and newcomer languages like Nim are seeking their own comfort zones between security, speed, and convenience. Still,D can potentially make a case for itself in the face of those odds, and it has now added one more way to do so. <\/p>\n
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