Why does D rely on a GC?

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 8/18/14, 11:50 PM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Monday, 18 August 2014 at 23:48:24 UTC, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> On 8/18/14, 8:51 AM, bearophile wrote:
>>> Jonathan M Davis:
>>>
>>>> The biggest reason is memory safety. With a GC, it's possible to make
>>>> compiler guarantees about memory safety, whereas with
>>>> manual memory management, it isn't.
>>>
>>> Unless you have a very smart type system and you accept some compromises
>>> (Rust also uses a reference counter some some cases, but I think most
>>> allocations don't need it).
>>>
>>> Bye,
>>> bearophile
>>
>> It's very smart, yes. But it takes half an hour to compile the
>> compiler itself.
>
> The compilation speed is caused by the C++ code in their compiler
> backend (LLVM), which gets compiled at least twice during the
> bootstraping process.

Generally speaking how fast is the Rust compiler at compiling Rust files?

>> And you have to put all those unwrap and types everywhere, I don't
>> think it's fun or productive that way.
>
>
> There I fully agree. If they don't improve lifetime's usability, I don't
> see Rust being adopted by average developers.

Could you please substantiate this with a couple of examples?


Andrei