On Sunday, 10 July 2016 at 03:25:16 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
Just like there is no C++ book that does not rant about how
great RAII is... What do you expect from a language evangelic?
The first Java implementation Hotspot inherited its technology
from StrongTalk, a Smalltalk successor. It was not a Java
phenomenon, and FWIW both Lisp, Simula and Algol68 were garbage
collected.
Please stop intentionally missing the point. I don't care if
Leonardo Da Vinci already had invented GC - which wouldn't
surprise me - but this is not the point. My point is that GC
became a big thing in the late 90ies early 2000s which is in part
owed to Java having become the religion of the day (not Lisp or
SmallTalk)[1]. D couldn't have afforded not to have GC when it
first came out. It was expected of a (new) language to provide GC
by then - and GC had become a selling point for new languages.
[1] And of course computers had become more powerful and could
handle the overhead of GC better than in the 80ies.
What was "new" with Java was compile-once-run-everywhere.
Although, that wasn't new either, but it was at least
marketable as new.
Java was the main catalyst for GC - or at least for people
demanding it. Practically everybody who had gone through IT
courses, college etc. with Java (and there were loads) wanted
GC. It was a given for many people.
Well, yes, of course Java being used in universities created a
demand for Java and similar languages. But GC languages were
extensively used in universities before Java.
Yes, it didn't last long. But the fact that they bothered to
introduce it, shows you how big GC was/is.
No, it shows how demanding manual reference counting was in
Objective-C on regular programmers. GC is the first go to
solution for easy memory management, and has been so since the
60s. Most high level languages use garbage collection.
It wasn't demanding. I wrote a lot of code in Objective-C and it
was perfectly doable. You even have features like `autorelease`
for return values. The thing is that Apple had become an
increasingly popular platform and more and more programmers were
writing code for OS X. So they thought, they'd make it easier and
reduce potential memory leaks (introduced by not so experienced
Objective-C coders) by adding GC, especially because a lot of
programmers expected GC "in this day and age".
