Idea #1 on integrating RC with GC

[Joseph Cassman]

On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 20:02:45 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 17:55:36 UTC, Andrei 
> Alexandrescu wrote:
>> I think at this stage we need more people to start with. 
>> Someone pointed out recently we have 77 lifetime contributors 
>> to github, as opposed to e.g. Rust which has 292.
>
> It's unfortunate that D's biggest competitor is Rust. Being 
> pushed by Mozilla means they automatically have access to a 
> larger pool of contributors that contribute to other Mozilla 
> stuff, who probably wouldn't have contributed to Rust otherwise.
>
> However, I think DDMD will bring about a small bump in 
> contributors. Personally, I haven't used C++ in awhile, and 
> I've grown rusty. At this point, D is probably the language I'm 
> most comfortable with, especially for hacking on something 
> complex like a compiler. I imagine there are at least a few 
> people who feel the same way and are waiting for DDMD before 
> they take a crack at contributing.

I have to agree. It's been over ten years since I have done any 
C++ seriously and as a result feel a lot of friction when trying 
to get up to speed on working with the D compiler code-base. 
Truth be told, that is part of the reason I like D in the end, 
it's not C++. Being able to use D to hack on the compiler would 
make it much more feasible for me to contribute.

Joseph