On Monday, 3 February 2014 at 02:58:59 UTC, Manu wrote:
But D ticks all the boxes, except that one... and it's an
important field
that isn't covered by the rest of the landscape of emerging or
trendy
languages.
I think it's also telling that newcomers constantly raise it
as a massive
concern, or even a deal-breaker. Would they feel the same
about ARC? I
seriously doubt it. I wonder if a poll is in order...
Agree with Manu 100% there and the rest of his post as well. I
imagine standing in that little crowd he talked to.
Anyone asking for the addition of ARC or owning pointers to D,
gets pretty much ignored. The topic is "Smart pointers instead of
GC?", remember? People here seem to be more interested in
diverting to nullable, scope and GC optimization. Telling, indeed.
And, yes, as I posted, I believe one could keep D's syntax
unchanged, including GC allocation via new, by changing the
memory regime under the hood and providing for ARCs and owning
pointers on top of GC. It would be a lot of work taking into
account storage classes, type construction, pointer interaction
and what not), I understand. But it would be better spent than on
more of the same garbage ... err ... collection.
So it's a done deal, then? D didn't go all the way to become a
systems or highest performance language? Instead, it wants to
grab a piece of that Java / C# pie?
Good luck with that. I don't think those guys are as open to
change as the C++ guys, also given the higher complexity (i.e.
richness) of D compared to C# / Java.
IMHO, the D implementers should really reconsider what language
features they would like to concentrate on if they want to be
around in the years to come.
