If I had my way

[Paulo Pinto]

Hi,

please spend some time reading the research papers from
Native Oberon(Oberon), Topaz(Modula-2+), Spin(Modula-3),
Singularity(Sing#), just to cite a few examples.

People can argument against that this type of environment
is only possible in research, personally I
am convinced that there are many other reasons like legacy
support, to prevent an widespread support of such systems.

It is just that it takes time to adapt new technologies and
change people's mentalities. Just look how long it took for
funcional programming concepts to become part of mainstream
languages. It takes generations.

--
Paulo




Am 11.12.2011 14:15, schrieb maarten van damme:
>
> 2011/12/11 Paulo Pinto <pjmlp at progtools.org <mailto: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.