Linus with some good observations on garbage collection

[Francisco Almeida]

== Quote from bearophile (bearophileHUGS at lycos.com)'s article
> Andrei:
> > It might not a good use of our time to further engage in a diatribe on this.
> Just a note: you have not wasted your time discussing this, because I am not
expert on such matters, so I learn something from informed discussions :-)
> If a book that explains C language is just 200 pages long, a book that explains
the design purpose, design constraints and design compromises of every feature of
C language requires a much longer book (800 pages?), and it's probably also much
more interesting :-)
> Bye,
> bearophile

As one of those who were the most reluctant about abandoning delete, I have come
to realize that it is better to make D classes strictly garbage collected, and
drop delete.

It should be noted that D supports RAII, as long as one uses struct (thus avoiding
dynamic polymorphism, which shouldn't make a big difference once you think about
it), and this gives D an important semantic separation lacking in C++ (or even
those languages on the other side of the fence such as Java, for that matter).

Making a habit of declaring struct instead of class when I intend to create
"objects" on the stack instead of the heap, while resorting to garbage collected
classes when it makes sense to do so, has made my life simpler.

I do believe, however, that there is a recurrent communication error going on here.

I would kindly ask the language designers to please update the documentation and
write an article explaining the advantages of the approach (without making the
mistake of turning it into a blind praise of garbage collection, that is).
Newcomers need to know how to obtain garbage collected or RAII data structures
from D, whenever they want to.