Maybe D is right about GC after all !

[rjframe]

On Tue, 26 Dec 2017 14:54:14 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:

> On 12/26/2017 1:03 AM, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
>> The point is that the presence of one @safe: line in the module can be
>> mechanically checked, over one million devs working on a codebase.
>> 
>> The whole point of Walter argumentation is 'mechanically'.
> 
> That's right. C++ is based on faith in the programmer using best
> practices. D is not based on faith, it can be automatically checked.


If the programmer opts-in to those checks... it's a +1 for pragmatism but 
does make marketing the language a bit weird -- one-liners spawn 
objections to the integrity of the claim (such as a portion of this 
thread; if there are objections within the community, how much more will 
we find objections outside it!).

When I hear someone talk about a memory-safe language (especially as a 
major feature), I do think memory-safe by default. The thing is, D does 
have support for memory-safety by default (bound-checked arrays, etc.), 
and allows you to opt-in to greater safety guarantees; but that's not what 
many think of when they think memory-safe (it doesn't really help that 
every language provides their own, slightly different, definition).

And D has faith that programmers using @trusted know what they're doing 
(for both writing and calling the function). There is no avoiding trust in 
a useful language.