On Mon, 03 Feb 2014 12:51:20 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 2/3/14, 12:21 PM, Adam Wilson wrote:
On Mon, 03 Feb 2014 12:02:29 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 2/3/14, 6:57 AM, Frank Bauer wrote:
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.
I thought I made it clear that GC avoidance (which includes
considering built-in reference counting) is a major focus of 2014.
Andrei
Andrei, I am sorry to report that anything other than complete removal
of the GC and replacement with compiler generated ARC will be
unacceptable to a certain, highly vocal, subset of D users.
Why would you be sorry? "It is what it is", "customer is always right"
etc. If we deem that important then we should look into supporting that
scenario.
There is a big difference between supporting a scenario, and forcing it
down everyone's throats as The One True Path. I would actually get out an
pull for supporting both, equally. Let me choose, I know more about the
memory usage patterns of my cloud-based service than a game developer
does. In some cases ARC is more efficient, in other cases, the extra
effort required is more than I care to pay my programmers for. In fact,
for all of our projects, the efficiency cost of the GC is microscopic
compared to having to pay the developer/time cost of ARC or Manual
management. There is a reason we are an exclusively C# shop right now. And
Apple/Obj-C has consistently proved that all the hype about ARC being more
efficient for free is untrue. There are plenty of complaints in that camp
about having to hunt down heisenleaks based on ARC leaking because
somebody forgot to mark something as weak.
No arguments
can be made to otherwise, regardless of validity. As far as they are
concerned the discussion of ARC vs. GC is closed and decided. ARC is the
only path forward to the bright and glorious future of D. ARC most
efficiently solves all memory management problems ever encountered.
Peer-Reviewed Research and the Scientific Method be damned! ALL HAIL
ARC!
Sadly, although written as hyperbole, I feel that the above is fairly
close to the actual position of the ARC crowd.
I'm going on a limb here, but it seems you're not convinced :o).
Andrei
Hehe, you might say that. I did buy the GC Handbook to learn more about
GC's after all, not replace them with something that has demonstrable
drawbacks. :-)
--
Adam Wilson
GitHub/IRC: LightBender
Aurora Project Coordinator
