D is nice whats really wrong with gc??

bomat Tempest_spam at gmx.de
Fri Dec 22 12:53:44 UTC 2023


On Monday, 18 December 2023 at 16:44:11 UTC, Bkoie wrote:
> but what is with these ppl and the gc?
> [...]

I'm a C++ programmer in my day job. Personally, I have no problem 
with a GC, but one of my colleague is a total C fanboy, so I feel 
qualified to answer your question. :)

I think the problem most "old school" programmers have with 
automatic garbage collection, or *any* kind of "managed" code, 
really, is not the GC itself, but that it demonstrates a wrong 
mindset.

If you use (or even feel tempted to use) a GC, it means that you 
don't care about your memory. Neither about its layout nor its 
size, nor when chunks of it are allocated or deallocated, etc.
And if you don't care about these things, you should not call 
yourself a programmer. You are the reason why modern software 
sucks and everything gets slower and slower despite the 
processors getting faster and faster. In fact, you probably 
should get another job, like flooring inspector or something. :)

And although this is not my opinion (otherwise I wouldn't use D), 
I have to admit that this isn't completely wrong. I like my 
abstractions because they make my life easier, but yeah, they 
detach me from the hardware, which often means things are not 
quite as fast as they could possibly be. It's a tradeoff.

Of course, people with a "purer" mindset could always use the 
"BetterC" subset of D... but then again, why should they? C is 
perfect, right? :)


More information about the Digitalmars-d-learn mailing list