Hello World

Syntactically, D looks very much like C/C++/C#/Java. There are the keywords like if, while, class, struct, int, double, private with unsurprising semantics. Here is the canonical Hello World application.

import std.stdio;

void main() {
  writeln("Hello World!");
}

The reason to start with this, is to test the build setup. Download and install the dmd compiler. Put the code above into a file called hello.d. Then compile and execute.

$ dmd hello.d
$ ./hello
Hello World!

If you cannot get this to run, you should ask for help at the D Learn Forum or in the #d IRC channel on Freenode.

Convenience

For a more convenient interface, the rdmd wrapper allows to compile-and-execute directly.

$ rdmd hello.d
Hello World!

The nice fact about rdmd is that it finds additional files automatically and compiles them in, whereas dmd only compiles the arguments. Hence, rdmd serves as a simplistic build tool, such that you might not even need something like a Makefile.

The compiler is quite fast, so it might feel like using a scripting language. You could even put the invocation into the file as a shebang on UNIX and use D for small scripts.

#!/usr/bin/env rdmd