Am 09.10.2013 19:05, schrieb Manu:
On 10 October 2013 01:46, Paulo Pinto <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:Am 09.10.2013 16:30, schrieb Manu: On 9 October 2013 17:31, Walter Bright <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:newshound2@__digitalmars.com <mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote: On 10/9/2013 12:29 AM, Manu wrote: Does anyone here REALLY believe that a bunch of volunteer contributors can possibly do what apple failed to do with their squillions of dollars and engineers? I haven't heard anybody around here propose the path to an acceptable solution. It's perpetually in the too-hard basket, hence we still have the same GC as forever and it's going nowhere. What do you propose? ARC. I've been here years now, and I see absolutely no evidence that the GC is ever going to improve. I can trust ARC, it's predictable, I can control it. Also, proper support for avoiding the GC without severe inconvenience as constantly keeps coming up. But I don't think there's any debate on that one. Everyone seems to agree. As someone that is in the sidelines and doesn't really use D, my opinion should not count that much, if at all. However, rewriting D's memory management to be ARC based will have performance impact if the various D compilers aren't made ARC aware. Supporting ARC in the compiler _is_ the job. That includes a cyclic-reference solution. Then there is the whole point of rewriting phobos and druntime to use ARC instead of GC. It would be transparent if properly supported by the compiler. Will the return on investment pay off, instead of fixing the existing GC? If anyone can even _imagine_ a design for a 'fixed' GC, I'd love to hear it. I've talked with a lot of experts, they all mumble and groan, and just talk about how hard it is. What will be the message sent to the outsiders wondering if D is stable enough to be adopted, and see these constant rewrites? People didn't run screaming from Obj-C when they switched to ARC. I think they generally appreciated it.
Because Objective-C's GC design was broken, as I mentioned on my previous posts.
Anyway, you make good points, thanks for the reply. -- Paulo
