On Friday, 8 July 2016 at 21:53:58 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
On Friday, 8 July 2016 at 12:46:03 UTC, Chris wrote:
As for GC, it's hard to tell. When D was actually (not
hypothetically) created, GC was _the_ big thing. Java had just
taken off, people were pissed off with C/C++, programming and
coding was becoming more and more common.
Errr... Garbage collection was common since the 60s.
Which is not the point. My point was that everybody wanted GC
after Java. And D was invented when GC was expected by many
people.
One problem with GC in the late 80s and early 90s is that it
requires twice as much memory and memory was scarce so
reference counting was/is the better option. You could make the
same argument about templates, memory...
Which is why D wouldn't have taken off in the 80ies (see my post
above).
I also don't recall anyone being in awe of Java having GC. The
big selling point was portability and the very hyped up idea
that Java would run well in the browser, which did not
materialize. Another selling point was that it wasn't
Microsoft...
GC was a big selling point. Every Java book went on about how
much safer it is, that you have more time for productive code,
blah ... Apple even added GC to Objective-C to appease the GC
crowd.
