Why many programmers don't like GC?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Thursday, 14 January 2021 at 00:37:29 UTC, mw wrote:
> ok, what I really mean is:
>
> ... in other "(more popular) languages (than D, and directly 
> supported by the language & std library only)" ...

Well, even Python supports both, if you want to, so... I suppose 
you mean system level programming languages? The reality is that 
GC for a system level programming language is not popular to 
begin with. In that domain it is fairly common to not use the 
standard library and use custom runtimes as we can see for C and 
C++.

Anyway, what makes the D GC weak is exactly that there is not 
much support for it in the D language or the compilers, only in 
the runtime and the bare minimum of RTTI. LLVM support more 
advanced GC features than D provides.

So, the D GC doesn't do much more for programmers than Boehm. And 
Boehm is not popular either...

Oilpan, that Chrome uses has more advanced features than the D 
GC, and does what most system level programmers want: limits it 
to designated GC types and supports incremental collection. The 
downside is that each Oilpan GC type also has to specify which 
pointers to trace, but then again, not being able to do that in D 
is a disadvantage...

For systems programming, I think D would be better off 
appropriating the approach taken by Oilpan and mix it with 
reference counting, but make it a language/compiler feature. That 
is at least a proven approach for one big interactive 
application. Basically make "D class" objects GC and everything 
else RC or manual.