Mac Apps That Use Garbage Collection Must Move to ARC

[Manu via Digitalmars-d]

On 23 February 2015 at 14:11, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On 2/22/15 5:57 PM, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>
>> I can easily visualise a way forward with RC.
>
>
> Then do it. Frankly it seems to me you're doing anything you possibly can to
> talk yourself out of doing work.

Excellent technique to immediately invalidate everything someone says.
Thanks for that.
You dismissed absolutely everything I said, and then imply that I have
no right to comment unless I do it myself.
It's got nothing to do with doing work. ARC (or something like it) is
almost religiously opposed. We can't even have a reasonable
conversation about it, or really explore it's implications before
someone (that ideally know's what they're doing) thinks about writing
code. There's no room for progress in this environment.

What do you want me to do? I use manual RC throughout my code, but the
experience in D today is identical to C++. I can confirm that it's
equally terrible to any C++ implementation I've used. We have no tools
to improve on it.
And whatever, if it's the same as C++, I can live with it. I've had
that my whole career (although it's sad, because we could do much
better).
The problem, as always, is implicit allocations, and allocations from
3rd party libraries. While the default allocator remains incompatible
with workloads I care about, that isolates us from virtually every
library that's not explicitly written to care about my use cases.
That's the situation in C++ forever. We're familiar with it, and it's
shit. I have long hoped we would move beyond that situation in D
(truly the #1 fantasy I had when I first dove in to D 6 years back),
but it's a massive up-hill battle to even gain mindshare, regardless
of actual implementation. There's no shared vision on this matter, the
word is basically "GC is great, everyone loves it, use an RC lib".

How long do we wait for someone to invent a fantastical GC that solves
our problems and works in D? I think it's practically agreed that no
known design can work, but nobody wants to bite the bullet and accept
the fact.
We need to admit we have an impassable problem, and then maybe we can
consider alternatives openly. Obviously, it would be disruptive, but
it might actually work... which is better than where we seem to be
heading (with a velocity of zero).

The fact is, people who are capable of approaching this problem in
terms of actual code will never even attempt it until there's
resounding consensus that it's worth exploring.