On Friday, 11 July 2014 at 19:46:25 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I agree that the GC phobia is way, WAY, overblown for practical
programming.
I agree with this, as well, but it's a generalization.
There are some applications that the current GC is not suitable
for, but D provides a plethora of features for disabling the GC
or managing memory in other ways (very cool), so I don't see a
reason to not use D even for the most demanding problem. I love
the GC for some things I do, but can't use it for other things I
do. For the vast majority of applications I see people using D
for, however, I see no reason why there should be any worry about
the GC.
The problem, however, when managing one's own memory is that one
cannot use some of the built-in types, like Exceptions, that are
instantiated deep within the runtime. A solution to this would
likely quiet some of the clamoring, IMO.
I would be interested in hearing any suggestions for disabling
the GC and still making use of Exceptions, dynamic arrays, etc...
using a user-supplied memory manager. Maybe something like this
already exists, and people like me just aren't aware of it.
Being a novice still, I don't know what the solution is. At the
moment I exploring region-based memory management (nice example
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region-based_memory_management).
I also saw some proposals for something like
gc.pushAllocator(myAllocator)/gc.popAllocator(), which would be
nice.
Mike
