Opportunities for D

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 7/10/2014 3:34 AM, Dicebot wrote:
> On Wednesday, 9 July 2014 at 19:47:02 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Is CDGC's Luca's earlier work on concurrent GC?
> Yes.

Great!


>>> I'd state it differently: "Marketing fuss about goroutines is the killer feature
>>> of Go" :) It does not have any fundamental advantage over existing actor model
>>> and I doubt it will matter _that_ much.
>>
>> Much of the froth about Go is dismissed by serious developers, but they nailed
>> the goroutine thing. It's Go's killer feature.
>
> Who are "they"?

I've heard it multiple times from people I trust. Sorry I can't be more specific.


> I don't know any serious developer who praises goroutines if he
> was not a CSP fan before. I forsee that it will make no impact for D because we
> simply don't have resources to advertise it as killing feature (on a same scale
> Go did).

Will it be a killer feature for D? No. But it is a valuable feature, and it 
looks to me like we can implement it without great effort, and without any 
language changes. If it can stop a major client from saying "we're going to use 
Go instead of D because of this" then it is worth it.


> You are totally missing the point if you consider this even comparable
> replacement. Reason why non-nullable types are awesome because you are 100% sure
> compiler will force you to handle null cases and if program compiles it is
> guaranteed to be safe in that regard. What you propose makes hardly any difference.

I'll risk annoying everyone by repeating at this point "what do you propose". 
Making non-null pointers the default is going to break every D program and so is 
not acceptable.