Why I Love D: An Undergrad Experience

Abstract:  As a student of Computer Science at UVU, the D programming language has been a breath of fresh air after learning "standard" languages used in industry like Java, C++, and C#. This experience report shows some of the places where D really shone in assignments at Utah Valley University, specifically for the virtual machine, assembler, and compiler constructed as part of UVU's Computer Science capstone track.

Students at UVU are encouraged to use the language they feel the most familiar with in order to complete higher-level programming assignments. The author decided to use D as the language of choice for the series of projects that serve as the capstone for the Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science at UVU, which is a toolchain composed of three components:

• A virtual machine that implements a register-register architecture, complete with static and stack-based memory.
• An assembler that targets bytecode executed by the virtual machine.
• A compiler that implements the KXI 2015 language developed at UVU, which is a very simple class-oriented language similar to C++ and D in syntax. The compiler's backend targets the assembler.

There are many places where D has significantly enhanced the development of these projects. Focuses in this talk will be:

• The D module system
• Dynamic arrays and associative arrays (and the range interface, to a lesser degree)
• The powerful string backend provided by D
• Templates – which were a much more pleasant experience than C++
• Enums, especially in tandem with std.conv.to
• Functional programming paradigm features
• Relatively small features like @property
• Other minor syntax differences (UFCS)

Speaker Bio: Erich Gubler is an undergraduate student, graduating this Fall with a Bachelor's Degree of Computer Science at Utah Valley University. The most relevant of his programming projects include the implementation of an academic compiler toolchain using D under the guidance of UVU faculty.