Why many programmers don't like GC?

[aberba]

On Monday, 18 January 2021 at 13:14:16 UTC, Arafel wrote:
> On 18/1/21 13:41, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> Yes, it is natural that the current D population don't mind 
>> the current GC. Otherwise they would be gone... but then you 
>> have to factor in all the people that go through the revolving 
>> door and does not stay. If they stayed the eco system would be 
>> better. So the fact that they don't... is effecting everyone 
>> in a negative way (also those that har happy with the runtime).
>
> I must be in the minority here because one of the reasons why I 
> started using D was precisely because it HAS a GC with full 
> support. I wouldn't even have considered it if it hadn't.
>
> For what I usually do (non-critical server-side unattended 
> processing) latency is most obviously not an issue, and I for 
> me not having to worry about memory management and being able 
> to focus on the task at hand is a requirement.

1). You're not a minority at all. System programming is also vast 
so having a GC (especially D's special kind of GC) is nothing 
alien in System programming. If you look out there, you'd see 
most of the very important software (for the lack of a better 
word) written uses some form of GC.

2). I'm not sure anyone really know how many people use D, stay 
with D after first encounter or leave. So we're all guessing our 
biases. And I wouldn't look at just the core language as why 
someone will move to D or not.

 From my experiencing freelancing, I've come to see that a large 
portion of clients' decision stems from other things like 
familiarity and ecosystem (packages, frameworks, vendor/cloud 
support, engineering hiring pool, consultants/support 
availability, tooling, marketing/popularity/fomo/community, 
etc)... including things that usually comes from the community 
and stakeholders. For D we don't really have any measure of 
community size. Only looking at the forum can be misleading.

3). Using GC doesn't mean you're writing scripts. A significant 
amonnt of very large D code I've read (including those from long 
time users) use GC... sometimes partially. So to think or assume 
GC is hurting D is an unmeasured bias.

I'm not saying those who are looking for nogc don't really matter 
(even though I hold the opinion that one can write nogc code in D 
just fine). dplug is written in D. What else couldn't?

Also maybe the GC and other complaints (genuine or not), which 
I'm also a culprit, might actually be a contributing to people's 
first impression of D when they visit the forums. I have a 
strongly suspicious of this.