Klumpp: Adventures in D programming

At his blog, Matthias Klumpp reflects on his experience writing the asgen tool for AppStream metadata generation using, of all things, the D programming language. "I started to implement the same examples in D just for fun, as I didn’t plan to use D (I was aiming at Go back then), but the language looked interesting. The D language had the huge advantage of being very familiar to me as a C/C++ programmer, while also having a rich standard library, which included great stuff like std.concurrency.Generator, std.parallelism, etc." What follows is a "huge braindump of things" Klumpp found enjoyable, including built-in unit-test support, safe functions, scope blocks, and documentation generation. After that, however, comes Klumpp's list of complaints—starting with the proprietary reference compiler and the not-quite-complete free-software compilers.