OSNews article about C++09 degenerates into C++ vs. D discussion

[Dave]

Mike Capp wrote:
>> One issue brought up is that of D "requiring" the
>> use of a GC. What would it take to prove that wrong
>> by making a full blown standard lib that doesn't
>> use a GC, and in fact doesn't have a GC?
>>
>> It would be painful to work with but no more so
>> than in C++. OTOH with scope() and such, it might
>> be easy.
> 
> It's not just a library issue, and in some ways I think it *would* be
> significantly more painful than in C++. D has a lot of innocuous-looking syntax
> that allocates heap memory non-obviously; AA and dynamic array initialization
> syntax, for instance. Without a GC, that's a lot of leaks and/or runtime errors
> waiting to happen.
> 
> I don't think it's an impossible sell, though. It would help to have a -nogc
> compiler switch or syntax attribute that disallowed usage of these constructs. And
> the scope stuff is coming on nicely; if Walter extends it to support RAII member
> data, as he's mentioned a few times, it'd be great.
> 
> The other big issue mentioned in the article comments is that D's GC
> implementation is lacking. It's hard to say whether a language with native
> pointers would really play nice with a copying collector, f'rinstance. Now that

IIRC, Walter has mentioned that he has some ideas for that. Anyhow, I think the restrictions listed 
in the D GC doc. covers most/all the concerns about pointers and a moving collector:

http://digitalmars.com/d/garbage.html

> Java is GPL it'll be interesting to see whether the JVM's GC implementation can be
> yanked out for use by other languages: it's generational, copying and pretty
> well-tuned.
> 
> There's some other stuff that's been buzzing around in my head about thread-local
> heaps lately, but it's not coherent enough to constitute a suggestion yet.