On Sunday, 12 January 2014 at 10:27:42 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
[...] Adding concurrency would also be nice...
I just want to point out that from an outer perspective, this is
a really really *really* big deal.
By far the most common arguments I've heard against D are:
1. library availability (derelict, deimos now)
2. community size and impetus (getting there!)
3. shared druntime/phobos so Hello World isn't 800kb (getting
there?)
4. garbage collector which is only possible to opt out of by
writing C
The very reliance of the garbage collector, regardless of how far
between the stop-the-world sweeps are, is a showstopper for many
people. They hear GC and think Java pauses. Being able to
honestly claim "well it runs concurrently in a separate thread
and doesn't[*] incur any performance penalty" would be the single
biggest leap to greater adoption D could take at this point.
Maybe barring "it prints money", but only maybe.
It may be less of a *technical* problem than, say, this or that
bug in the type system, or the identity crisis of shared. But
fixing those would not make for a *twentieth* of the marketing
that a concurrent GC would. Fixing those would make people stay
-- introducing that GC would make people join.
Not saying that such bugs shouldn't get attention, I'm just
saying that Bob would scroll past that link on /r/programming. In
comparison, Lucarella's dconf slides were... *compelling*.
(P.S. many awkwardly long hugs to those culling allocations from
druntime/phobos, you rock)
