If I had my way

maarten van damme maartenvd1994 at gmail.com
Sun Dec 11 05:15:28 PST 2011


2011/12/11 Paulo Pinto <pjmlp at progtools.org>

> Am 10.12.2011 21:35, schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu:
>
>> On 12/10/11 2:22 PM, maarten van damme wrote:
>>
>>> Just for fun I
>>> wanted to create a program as little as possible, compiled without
>>> garbage collector/phobos/... and it turned out that compiling without
>>> garbage collector is pretty much impossible (memory leaks all around the
>>> place in druntime). dynamic linking for the d standard library would be
>>> a great new option for a dmd release in the future :).
>>>
>>
>> Using D without GC is an interesting direction, and dynamic linking
>> should be available relatively soon.
>>
>>
>> Andrei
>>
>
> As a long time beliver in systems programming languages with GC support
> (Modula-3, Oberon, Sing#, ...), I think allowing this in D is the wrong
> direction.
>
> Sure provinding APIs to control GC behavior makes sense, but not turn it
> off, we already have enough languages to do systems programming without GC.
>

I was only trying it "for the fun of it", not to be used seriously. D
should always have it's GC support built-in and have some functions to
control it's behaviour (core.memory). But I think that D, beeing a systems
programming language, should also be able to be used without GC. I don't
mean phobos to be writtin without a GC in mind but druntime should be
compilable with something like a -nogc flag that make it usable without GC.

There are a lot of users out there who think that a GC produces terribly
slow programs, big hangs while collecting,... (thank java for that. Right
now the java GC has been improved and it's extremely good but the memory
stays :p)
Letting them know that D can be run without GC can be a good point. If they
don't like it, they can turn it off.
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