On Monday, 11 July 2016 at 09:30:37 UTC, Chris wrote:
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.
This is not true, it is just wishful thinking. D was harmed by the GC, not propelled by it. I am not missing any point, sorry. Just go look at what people who gave up on D claim to be a major reason, the GC scores high...
It wasn't demanding. I wrote a lot of code in Objective-C and it was perfectly doable.
Of course it was doable, but developers had trouble getting it right. In Objective-C Foundation you have to memorize what kind of ownership functions return. A responsibility which ARC is relieving the developer from. Autorelease-pools does not change that, and you have to take special measures to avoid running out of memory with autorelease pools as it is a very simple region-allocator (what Walter calls a bump--allocator) so autorelease pools are not a generic solution.
Objective-C had a very primitive manual RC solution that relied on conventions. They added a GC and ARC and only kept ARC. As simple as that.
C++ actually has much robust memory management that what Objective-C had.
