On Thursday, 17 July 2014 at 09:57:09 UTC, currysoup wrote:
On Thursday, 17 July 2014 at 09:26:38 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Thursday, 17 July 2014 at 09:20:36 UTC, Russel Winder via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
It appears still to be a general meme that performance
required no GC
and GC mean poor performance. The debate has been restarted
on the Go
mailing list under the banner "go without garbage collector".
The
response to will Go remove the garbage collector was somewhat
unequivocal: nope.
That's good news in a way. If a big company accepts GC and the
Go crowd go with it (pardon the pun), then it will find more
acceptance (as Paulo pointed out in a different thread).
It's not about "acceptance", it's about the reality that a GC
is not a universal solution to memory management.
Point taken. But as has been said before 90-95% of all apps can
live happily with GC, and if you want, you can still go bare
metal with D. The security GC offers should not be underestimated
either. With "acceptance" I meant that people see "it cannot be
that bad after all for *most* applications". The GC issue is
often cited as a D-eal breaker. I understand that there are
applications that need total control over the memory. But those
apps have always been programmed in C or any other
close-to-the-machine language, and even then programmers (in
gaming for example) have to use additional tricks and hacks to
squeeze out every little bit of performance. What D has to do is
to facilitate control over the memory, but I still consider it a
systems programming language due to the fact that it has many
things to offer as regard the direct interaction with the machine
that Java and C# don't. Can you write a device drive in Java, if
yes, tell me how, I'm interested.
Just from watching a few of the DConf 2014 talks, if you want
performance you avoid the GC at all costs (even if that means
allocating into huge predefined buffers). Once you're going to
these lengths to avoid garbage collection it begs the question,
why are you even using this language? Within this community the
question is rhetorical but to outsiders I feel it's a major
concern.
Don't know if it's really a "major concern" or the favorite weak
spot that C++ et. al guys like to flog to death in order to
distract from the many strengths that D has (in comparison with
C++ et al.) The answer is always "D has GC, it's the Devil, don't
touch it!" Also, let's put a little faith in the brilliant
developers behind D, I'm sure there's a huge performance boost
for D around the corner.
