More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 6 May 2014 at 12:21:55 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> As for the gaming world, I don't really have the required 
> experience to talk much about it. Just doing the heads up that 
> D GC != GC that many of us use.

I very much appreciate the links you provide about different GC 
solutions, and GC can be appropriate for real time situations 
where you don't want to maximize resource utilization or where 
you have predictable downtime to collect.

However the approach taken by appliances (where the application 
reliability is more important than getting the highest possible 
execution speed) or business solutions such as Azul Zing (where 
scalability is more important than hardware cost) is not really 
suitable for system level programming. It is suitable for a wide 
range of applications, that is true.

You can have GC with predictable destructors, but you have to 
design the language and runtime around it. You can have real time 
GC, but you need a dedicated GC and structure your program to 
realize the potential.

I think the only realistic road for D is to imposing/infer 
constraints that makes certain that execution paths is compatible 
with desirable runtime properties and available runtime support 
for that specific thread. There is no silver bullet, but the 
implementation driven design that D seems to be undergoing is 
affecting the resulting language/run-time design in a bad way, 
IMO.