On Thursday, 17 July 2014 at 11:15:10 UTC, Chris wrote:
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.
I'm not here to hate on D, the reason I read these forums is because I love the language.
I feel it is a major concern, if I'm starting a project with low latency requirements* I certainly think twice about using D. I think this could apply especially to people outside the community who might not have experienced the benefits D provides. The issue is not there is a GC, it's that the GC is viewed as bad. If the GC was as good as Azul's C4 GC then D would be perfect. I'm not sure if D's memory model supports such a collector though.
*According to Don Clugston's talk the default GC can pause for ~250ms which is totally insane for any kind of interactive or near-real-time system. If their concurrent version of the GC could reduce this to 10ms it shows the GC implementation is fairly naive.
