Bottom line re GC in D

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 8 July 2014 at 03:37:51 UTC, Adrian wrote:
>  + Has the GC been dropped?

No, and no matter what exactly will be done, it surely will 
always stay at least as an option, and most probably will be 
enabled by default.

>  + If not, can it be disabled entirely/completely?
>

This is already possible for a long time. Normally it's only 
called when the memory allocator runs out of free memory, i.e. 
only on allocation, and you can call `GC.disable` to disable it 
completely.

For the upcoming release 2.066 (currently in beta), there will be 
a function attribute `@nogc` which makes the compiler error out 
if a function allocates GC memory (either directly, or by calling 
other non- at nogc functions). Parts of the standard library have 
already been marked as @nogc, so they can be used inside such 
functions, though this is still ongoing work. Other parts have 
been changed to avoid allocations, at least where possible. There 
are now also some alternatives to functions that return allocated 
data to accept a sink delegate instead, so that the caller can 
decides whether they want to allocate, and how.

> D has always greatly impressed me, but I need a systems 
> language without garbage collection; has D become that now?

Well, yes and no, see above ;-)

I guess more work in this direction will be enabled once we have 
`std.allocator`, which Andrei Alexandrescu is working on 
currently. There might also be other changes necessary, some kind 
of ownership tracking / borrowing for example, to make this safe. 
(Manual memory management without help from the language can 
easily lead to all kinds of bugs.)