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

[Miles]

Walter Bright wrote:
> The ones who don't want to use D will find the first excuse, valid or
> not. Fix the excuse, and they'll just move on to the next excuse, valid
> or not. It's a fool's game. I've been around that circle before. The
> people we should listen to are the people who actually *use* D, not the
> ones who just glanced at a chart looking for fault.

People who are using any tool today are people that benefit from its
features and are not affected by its shortcomings. Any other person
won't use that tool because it is not appropriate.

It is the same with D. If you keep listening only to people who actually
use D, D will end as a niche programming language: nobody outside that
niche will ever use it because D doesn't fit their needs, and their
needs are of no concern to the current users of D.

In my example, I would like to unplug the GC from D sometimes, or have a
more predictable reference-count-based GC (even if it would mean
disabling unions with pointers and a few other constructs).

> The poster who claimed that conservative gc is somehow incompatible with
> cryptographic software is misinformed. Even if he were correct, the
> cryptographic buffers could be allocated with malloc() and would then
> have no effect whatsoever on the gc.

Using two allocation methods in the same process address space looks
really bad, not to say hackish. And you don't need cryptographic buffers
or multimedia data, a single int variable is enough to hold a large
block of unused data in memory, and the larger the block is, the easier
it is for this to happen. Even if it was 1/2^32 of chances of this
happening, it still will happen.