suggestion: NIF_D

[Ulf Wiger]

Last week I was at the ACCU 2010 conference in Oxford, and
had a short discussion with Walter Bright, the inventor of D.
The discussion briefly touched the ErlOCaml project, and the
idea that one would like to have the option to drop into a
"safe" low-level language from Erlang. Walter (perhaps un-
surprisingly) suggested that D might be a suitable candidate.

I hadn't looked closer at D - only noted that it tended to
do very well in the shootout (no more, it seems, as I couldn't
find it there at all now). However, it does look very nice and
accessible to C programmers:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/ctod.html

Safety would come partly from the fact that it's a garbage-
collected language, and partly because it fixes many of the
idiosynchracies of C and C++.

Another nice aspect of D is that it is designed to be
relatively easy to analyse lexically, and compiles very
quickly. This seems to open up for some fairly funky inlining
or JIT code generation, but perhaps we're getting ahead of
ourselves here...

However, I realise that I spend far too little time coding
C et al to be the one to try this integration, or indeed
even to judge whether it would be worthwhile to do so.

Any other takers? Opinions?

BR,
Ulf W
-- 
Ulf Wiger
CTO, Erlang Solutions Ltd, formerly Erlang Training & Consulting Ltd
http://www.erlang-solutions.com
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