If I had my way

[Danni Coy]

Some of us essentially want "C++ done right".... D does is currently the
closest thing to this that I am aware of.

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 4:34 AM, Paulo Pinto <pjmlp at progtools.org> wrote:

> Am 11.12.2011 19:18, schrieb Manu:
>
>> On 11 December 2011 15:15, maarten van damme <maartenvd1994 at gmail.com
>> <mailto:maartenvd1994 at gmail.**com <maartenvd1994 at gmail.com>>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>    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.
>>
>>
>> That's got nothing to do with it. People who seriously NEED to be able
>> to use the language without the GC enabled are probably working on small
>> embedded systems with extremely limited resources. It's also possible
>> that various different resource types need to be allocated/located in
>> different places.
>> Also, In many cases, you need to able to have confidence in strict
>> deterministic allocation patterns. You can't do that with a GC enabled.
>> I'm all about having a GC in D, obviously, but I certainly couldn't
>> consider the language for universal adoption in many of my projects
>> without the option to control/disable it at times.
>> If I can't write some small programs with the GC completely disabled,
>> then I basically can't work on microprocessors. It's fair to give up the
>> standard library when working in this environment, but druntine, the
>> fundamental library, probably still needs to work. Infact, I'd
>> personally like it if it was designed in such a way that it never used
>> the GC under any circumstances. No library FORCED on me should restrict
>> my usage of the language in such a way.
>>
>
> In my experience programming embedded systems in highly constrained
> environments usually means assembly or at most a C compiler using lots
> of compiler specific extensions for the target environment.
>
> I fail to see how D without GC could be a better tool in such enviroments.
>
>
>
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