On Thursday, 17 July 2014 at 20:52:15 UTC, Hannes Steffenhagen
wrote:
Last time I checked, D was advertised as a systems programming
language and a real alternative to C/C++. I think we're good
for languages that cover the needs of web application
developers, that 5% is where most people interested in D would
be coming from.
Not that the web application thing is even entirely true; If
you have huge workloads you'll eventually want to take more
control than managed systems give you.
And with recent work in LDC and GDC it D is quite capable of it,
what Mike DConf talk brilliantly proves. You may even use some
parts of Phobos with help of @nogc! There are certain parts of
the language that trigger GC when it is entirely possible to
avoid that and we should fight those with no doubt. But that does
not mean removing GC from the core language.
And for any kind of web applications GC is not a problem if it is
concurrent GC (which is something to improve but unrelated to "GC
is evil" topic). Just the fact that your application _may_
generate a lot of garbage does not mean you have to do it. Use
custom allocators for most data and experience something Java
can't give you.
Now if you want to have _both_ automatic memory management _and_
removal of GC there will be some trouble. But it is something
that C/C++ can't give you either so mentioning it as a transition
blocker is hardly a good point.
Right now D is probably about 20% behind C++ feature-wise for
RAII / manual memory management coding style and this gap is
compensated with templates alone. After GDC (or was it LDC?) get
planned switches to remove RTTI related stuff I'd honestly
recommend anyone doing low-level project to give it a try.
