On Monday, 18 January 2021 at 13:14:16 UTC, Arafel wrote:
On 18/1/21 13:41, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
Yes, it is natural that the current D population don't mind
the current GC. Otherwise they would be gone... but then you
have to factor in all the people that go through the revolving
door and does not stay. If they stayed the eco system would be
better. So the fact that they don't... is effecting everyone
in a negative way (also those that har happy with the runtime).
I must be in the minority here because one of the reasons why I
started using D was precisely because it HAS a GC with full
support. I wouldn't even have considered it if it hadn't.
For what I usually do (non-critical server-side unattended
processing) latency is most obviously not an issue, and I for
me not having to worry about memory management and being able
to focus on the task at hand is a requirement.
1). You're not a minority at all. System programming is also vast
so having a GC (especially D's special kind of GC) is nothing
alien in System programming. If you look out there, you'd see
most of the very important software (for the lack of a better
word) written uses some form of GC.
2). I'm not sure anyone really know how many people use D, stay
with D after first encounter or leave. So we're all guessing our
biases. And I wouldn't look at just the core language as why
someone will move to D or not.
From my experiencing freelancing, I've come to see that a large
portion of clients' decision stems from other things like
familiarity and ecosystem (packages, frameworks, vendor/cloud
support, engineering hiring pool, consultants/support
availability, tooling, marketing/popularity/fomo/community,
etc)... including things that usually comes from the community
and stakeholders. For D we don't really have any measure of
community size. Only looking at the forum can be misleading.
3). Using GC doesn't mean you're writing scripts. A significant
amonnt of very large D code I've read (including those from long
time users) use GC... sometimes partially. So to think or assume
GC is hurting D is an unmeasured bias.
I'm not saying those who are looking for nogc don't really matter
(even though I hold the opinion that one can write nogc code in D
just fine). dplug is written in D. What else couldn't?
Also maybe the GC and other complaints (genuine or not), which
I'm also a culprit, might actually be a contributing to people's
first impression of D when they visit the forums. I have a
strongly suspicious of this.
