Anti-GC crowd tries to promote ARC as an deterministic alternative for
memory management.
I noticed that people promoting ARC do not provide any disadvantages
for proposed approach.
The thing is in gamedev and other soft-realitime software background
only a handfull types of resources are really managed by RC and memory
usage patterns are VERY specific to their domain (mostly linear
allocation/deallocation and objects with non deterministic lifetime are
preallocated in pools).
Trying to use RC as a general method of memory management leads to some
problems.
A pretty detailed view by John Harrop (He is somewhat known for
trolling in PL community, but nonetheless knows what he is talking
about) -
http://www.quora.com/Computer-Programming/How-do-reference-counting-and-garbage-collection-compare/answer/Jon-Harrop-1?srid=3Gvg&share=1#
So RC could also introduce unpredictable pause times at undesired places.
This is also confirmed by research from HP -
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/popl04/refcnt.pdf
My point is that we should not ruin the language ease of use. We do
need to deal with Phobos internal allocations, but we should not switch
to ARC as a default memory management scheme. In practice people
promoting ARC will probably not use phobos anyway. Currently its just
an excuse to not use D.
Look at c++ and STL, etc. People will roll their own solutions no
matter what you try.
