Smart pointers instead of GC?

[Frank Bauer]

On Monday, 3 February 2014 at 02:58:59 UTC, Manu wrote:
> But D ticks all the boxes, except that one... and it's an 
> important field
> that isn't covered by the rest of the landscape of emerging or 
> trendy
> languages.
>
>>>  I think it's also telling that newcomers constantly raise it 
>>> as a massive
>>> concern, or even a deal-breaker. Would they feel the same 
>>> about ARC? I
>>> seriously doubt it. I wonder if a poll is in order...


Agree with Manu 100% there and the rest of his post as well. I 
imagine standing in that little crowd he talked to.

Anyone asking for the addition of ARC or owning pointers to D, 
gets pretty much ignored. The topic is "Smart pointers instead of 
GC?", remember? People here seem to be more interested in 
diverting to nullable, scope and GC optimization. Telling, indeed.

And, yes, as I posted, I believe one could keep D's syntax 
unchanged, including GC allocation via new, by changing the 
memory regime under the hood and providing for ARCs and owning 
pointers on top of GC. It would be a lot of work taking into 
account storage classes, type construction, pointer interaction 
and what not), I understand. But it would be better spent than on 
more of the same garbage ... err ... collection.

So it's a done deal, then? D didn't go all the way to become a 
systems or highest performance language? Instead, it wants to 
grab a piece of that Java / C# pie?

Good luck with that. I don't think those guys are as open to 
change as the C++ guys, also given the higher complexity (i.e. 
richness) of D compared to C# / Java.

IMHO, the D implementers should really reconsider what language 
features they would like to concentrate on if they want to be 
around in the years to come.