[OT] Re: Why don't you advertise more your language on Quora etc ?

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, 2017-03-07 at 18:45 +0000, Rico Decho via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > D seems to be in a situation where those who don't care have a 
> > crap GC which needs to be improved and those who do care have 
> > the tools to deal with it. So there needs to be ongoing 
> > replacement of the D GC until there is something good, this is 
> > a technical problem. That people who care about the effect of 
> > GC still think D is a crap GC-based language implies there is a 
> > marketing problem, not a technical one.
> 
> But I don't think that D's GC is fine for people who care about 
> it.
> 
> If it is, why are people on this forum giving advices on how to 
> disable and/or avoid it for soft real-time applications where a 
> GC freeze can't be tolerated.

Because an option that may be sensibly available for those that cannot
cope with a GC language is for D to have a GC-less mode – at the
expense of not using Phobos. Of course soft-real time and GC are not
incompatible except in some people's minds: it is entirely possible to
have GC in a soft real-time system, if the programming language
supports it. The question here is only whether the current GC allows D
to be used for soft real time.

> D's GC isn't a crap at all, but better designs and 
> implementations exist, and Nim's GC is one of them.
> 
> We can either learn from it, or ignore it... But the second 
> solution won't make D more appropriate for soft real-time 
> scenarios...

The question is who is the "we" here. A lot of people have a lot of
opinions on D and it's GC, including me. However, it seems that none of
the people expressing opinions are willing to do anything other than
express opinions on the email list.

My gut feeling is that the D language execution and data model is not
compatible with a "do not stop the world" GC. However this is opinion
not really backed with evidence.

What needs to happen is for a group of people who like complaining
about the GC to get together and gather evidence as to what needs to
change in the D language to support a soft real-time compatible GC such
as Go, Nim, Java G1, etc. You can't just transplant an algorithm since
the GC has to fit with the language data and execution model and D is
more like C than like Java or Go.

If the result is that a change to the D execution or data model is
needed then this has to be proposed and debated. If this is not
something open to change, then there is no point in going any further.

I cannot commit to being involved in anything such as this until 2017-
06-30Y17:01+01:00, but from then there is a good possibility of getting
me on board an effort to create a new GC for D (but note I really abhor
the Phobos coding style with it's wrongly place opening braces).

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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