Built-in RAII in D

[Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 28 May 2017 at 18:50:02 UTC, Nerve wrote:

> Point taken. My only remaining reservation then is the 
> communication problem D has with the wider prospective 
> programming world in conveying that the GC has alternatives 
> that work.

More broadly, I think what we need to be doing is teaching people 
that D's GC is not their grandfather's GC and that, unless they 
are doing something highly specialized, they probably don't need 
alternatives. The GC is fine by itself for a number of apps and, 
where it isn't, mixing in a bit of @nogc is probably better than 
cutting it out altogether.

The problem is one of scale. We've had blog posts on this (for 
example, [1] and [2], and more to come), comments in threads at 
reddit and hacker news, tweets, Facebook posts... Any one of 
those is only going to reach a small number of people. Among 
those reached who aren't already aware, it's going to stick with 
an even smaller number.

However, each blog post on the topic is one more link that can be 
brought up in social media threads (in the appropriate contexts!) 
to bring it to a few more people and perhaps enlighten one or two 
more. Any D user who cares about this issue can do that easily. 
And, if you have a blog, write about it yourself. Submit a post 
to the D Blog (through me). Or host/submit a tutorial somewhere 
on memory management and RAII in D. Submit a talk for a 
programming conference or meetup.

This is something Walter and Andrei are aware of and they, too, 
would like to see the perception change. But the only way for 
that to happen is to make a long-term and sustained effort, with 
participation from D community at large (unless someone wants to 
fork over the cash for a targeted marketing blitz). It isn't 
going to happen overnight.

[1] https://dlang.org/blog/2017/03/20/dont-fear-the-reaper/
[2] 
https://dlang.org/blog/2017/04/28/automem-hands-free-raii-for-d/