On Tuesday, December 06, 2016 22:13:54 bpr via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote: > On Tuesday, 6 December 2016 at 17:00:35 UTC, Jonathan M Davis > > wrote: > > So, while there are certainly folks who would prefer using D as > > a better C without druntime or Phobos, I think that you're > > seriously overestimating how many folks would be interested in > > that. Certainly, all of the C++ programmers that I've worked > > with professionally would have _zero_ interest in D as a better > > C. > > I would guess that the vast majority of interest shown in Rust is > from people who essentially want a better C or C++, with no > runtime/GC. So, I think Ilya's point is very plausible. D with no > GC, but with modules, templates, overloading, CTFE, and some > other features might have been more tempting to the no-GC crowd, > which includes many hardcore C++ programmers.
Sure, there are folks who would prefer not to have to deal with the GC but throw out the runtime and std lib? You lose out on too much for it to be at all worth it for many folks. At that point, C++11/14/17 looks far more appealing, especially as it continues to improve. And @nogc and sane memory use largely solves the GC problem for many programs. There are some places where we need to improve the situation (like with lambdas and the GC), but for most programs, it's totally workable as-is without giving up on all of the features provided by the runtime and Phobos. If you really need absolute pedal-to-the-metal performance and can't afford to ever have the GC stop the world, you still don't need to actually throw away the runtime and std lib. You're just a lot more restricted in what you can do with them. So, tossing out druntime and Phobos entirely seems rather extreme. It may very well make really good sense for a subset of D programs, but I have a hard time believing that it's anything more than a small subset. > Those programmers who are comfortable working in a GC-ed language > will likely eschew D because D's GC is really not that great. We get plenty of folks who aren't big C/C++ programmers who are interested in D. Yes, the majority seem to have a C++ background, but we also get folks from C#, python, ruby, etc. - Jonathan M Davis
