On Wednesday, 26 December 2012 at 11:43:55 UTC, Benjamin Thaut
wrote:
In my experience its quite some work to remove the GC entierly,
but it is possible.
Hi Benjamin! I've seen your druntime and thBase repos on GitHub.
Very interesting stuff. As I have little (or to be honest: no)
experience in D it's difficult for me to judge how much work
needs to be done. Is the idea to replace Phobos completely?
Also it makes writing Code also easier ans more effektive in
some places
because:
-You don't have to register manually allocated blocks with the
gc
-You control the exact order of destruction
-You control the time of destruction
-You control in which thread a object gets destructed
-You will be encouraged to not write code that does do 100
allocations just to format a string (because it will leak)
I personally agree with all your points, but I must admit that
their relevance depends on the programming patterns you are
using. Experienced GC programmers certainly favour patterns that
work well with GC. I personally prefer a style of programming
that makes use of destructors and relies on them being executed
at the right time.
But obviously it has an impact on productivity.
I'm not sure about this at all. I write software that is designed
to offer a certain performance, and latency is a big issue. I
don't believe that I can achieve that with a "just allocate
memory and don't ever care" attitude. I would need some
background knowledge about how the GC works, and write code that
doesn't screw up badly. Manual memory management also requires me
to have an understanding of the implications behind it. But there
are well-tested helpers (e.g. smart pointers) that simplify the
task a lot.
I do admit that, when performance (both in the sense of being
fast and offering reliable performance) is not such a critical
issue, then GC won't hurt and "just allocating" is fine and of
course reduces development time. However, I tend to just use
Python for this class problems.
It comes down to a matter of choice and personal preference. I'm
not saying that GC is bad and shouldn't be used. Many people are
very happy with it and it does a great job for them. But my
personal preference is manual memory management (then again
greatly automated by use of reference counting and smart
pointers).
