LinkedIn Article to be: Why you need to start moving off C/C++ to D, now.

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 15 July 2014 at 20:03:15 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Monday, 14 July 2014 at 23:43:57 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 11:22:53PM +0000, John Carter via 
>> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Any other good blog posts / social media comments / pointers 
>>> I can
>>> digest and use?
>>
>> This one came to mind:
>>
>> http://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/09/19/edward-chands/
>>
>>
>
> From the link above:
>
> "It’s a common but false belief that reference counting (using 
> shared pointers in particular) is better than garbage 
> collection. There is actual research* showing that the two 
> approaches are just two sides of the same coin. You should 
> realize that deleting a shared pointer may lead to an arbitrary 
> long pause in program execution, with similar performance 
> characteristics as a garbage sweep. It’s not only because every 
> serious reference counting algorithm must be able to deal with 
> cycles, but also because every time a reference count goes to 
> zero on a piece of data a whole graph of pointers reachable 
> from that object has to be traversed. A data structure built 
> with shared pointers might take a long time to delete and, 
> except for simple cases, you’ll never know which shared pointer 
> will go out of scope last and trigger it."
>
> * http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/bacon-garbage.pdf

I've been wondering about this. Could the following argument be 
true?

Situations where automatic memory management are necessary are, 
by definition, the situations where one cannot easily reason 
about where memory freeing can occur. Therefore, no automatic 
memory management system can be considered practically 
predictable, unless you didn't* need it in the first place.

*strictly speaking