D programming language

Raised as a usability problem by 34 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 31 threads.

People raised many different problems with D programming language, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 37 complaints

Commenter can never figure out how to get a good IDE experience for D2026-07-28
Reusing the keyword void for an uninitialized value is confusing and hard to discover2026-04-01
Downloaded DCD binary segfaults on macOS, requiring manual local builds to get working2025-12-07
Dub is badly documented and includes test code in the generated binary2025-12-06
Returning ranges even for single items makes calling code awkward to write2025-10-26
Calling code cluttered with wrappers and dereferencing because of range-only APIs2025-10-24
Debugging and autocomplete are flaky in the D editor plugins2025-07-03
Fresh project fails to compile; unclear which tool to use2025-04-26
Dmd fails to compile a freshly initialised project, forcing the user to fight tooling2025-04-26
Users must download and switch between compilers, which is a bad experience2023-06-30
Very little tooling to see what is happening when things go wrong2022-10-12
Lacks loops and functions, so it is not usable beyond basic scripts2022-08-19
Two competing standard libraries made the ecosystem confusing to pick up2022-06-15
Confusing to choose between dmd and LLVM compilers; tooling unstable out of the box2022-01-12
Hello world cannot be compiled on an ordinary laptop because bootstrapping needs a mid-spec machine2020-07-02
Confusing for people who don't understand D ranges, especially return types2020-04-29
Docs hide return types behind 'auto', forcing users to hunt for what functions return2020-04-28
Array declared as int[5][10] is indexed as arr[9][4], confusing and error-prone2020-02-29
Documentation is hard to navigate and the tutorial is sparse, making features hard to find2020-01-28
Docs assume Java/C++ background, leaving the commenter confused navigating the stdlib2020-01-09
Feature bloat makes the language very hard to learn2019-10-19
Error messages span screens and standard library results are opaque to use2019-10-15
Code is cluttered with visual noise from @nogc and similar annotations2018-12-05
Too many competing compilers and library choices make getting started confusing and time-consuming2018-10-30
GC performed poorly and was practically impossible to disable2018-06-15
Long unseparated numbers like 1000000 are easy to misread and mistype2017-10-29
Docs use auto everywhere, so the return types needed for annotations are unknown2017-08-23
Original lambda syntax was awkward and pretty much unusable for users2017-07-21
Bare class declarations make null dereference crashes too easy to trigger2016-05-06
Syntax looks obfuscated and is hard to read compared to Python2016-01-03
Name makes it hard to search for information about it2014-04-08
Spent five minutes chasing links without finding any example of the syntax2013-12-16
Without proper intellisense, developers can't tell which function to use or its parameters2013-05-12
Can't tell which function to use, where it comes from, or its parameters2013-05-12
Hard to build projects: bugs, poor OSX support, outdated libraries, confusing D1/D2 and Phobos/Tango choices2009-10-31
Documentation is so poor that it is unusable for serious work2009-10-30
Hard to find good tutorials and OS X install instructions were wrong2009-06-16