If you’re a programmer, you’ve probably noticed the ever-growing stream of new technologies, languages and APIs, with new concepts and promises of speeding up development and making your life easier.

However, most of this technologies have been focused on web development, RAD or in radical new paradigms, without giving attention to low-level programming, generation of native code and speed. If you haven’t seen it already, I would like to bring to your attention the D programming language. It was created by Walter Bright, the developer of the first native C++ compiler and it’s meant to be the successor of both C and C++. D has more object orientation features than Java, many of the constructs of modern/high-level languages (Such as built-in strings, array concatenation and slicing, complex numbers, hash tables, templates, mixins and lazy evaluation) and the best of all: It compiles (cross platform) native binaries, giving all the speed and optimization you would expect of something coded in C++.

It’s hard to express all the features of D in such a short article, but it has already risen to the 14th position on the programming language rank, according to TIOBE, and with current growth rates will surpass Delphi soon. While it currently isn’t the easiest language to set up a build environment, it sure is a breeze (and incredibly fun!) to code with. The two compilers available right now are GDC and DMD and a good option for IDE is Code::Blocks (however, for D support, you’ll need to download the nightly builds).