C's Biggest Mistake on Hacker News

[Ecstatic Coder]

On Wednesday, 25 July 2018 at 16:39:51 UTC, bpr wrote:
> On Tuesday, 24 July 2018 at 17:24:41 UTC, Seb wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 24 July 2018 at 17:14:53 UTC, Chris M. wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, 24 July 2018 at 16:15:52 UTC, bpr wrote:
>>>> On Tuesday, 24 July 2018 at 14:07:43 UTC, Ecstatic Coder 
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> [...]
>>>>
>>>> No. For many C++ users, tracing GC is absolutely not an 
>>>> option. And, if it were, D's GC is not a shining example of 
>>>> a good GC. It's not even precise, and I would bet that it 
>>>> never will be. If I'm able to tolerate a GC, there are 
>>>> languages with much better GCs than the D one, like Go and 
>>>> Java.
>>>>
>>>> [...]
>>>
>>> There was a precise GC in the works at one point, no clue 
>>> what happened to it.
>>
>> The newest PR is:
>>
>> https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1977
>>
>> Though there's already a bit of precise scanning on Windows, 
>> e.g. https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1798 and IIRC 
>> Visual D uses a precise GC too.
>
> Well, this is a big problem with D IMO. There are a lot of 
> unfinished, half baked features which linger in development for 
> years. How long for precise GC now, over 5 years? I don't think 
> D was really designed to be friendly to GC, and it just isn't 
> realistic to expect that there will *ever* be a production 
> quality precise GC for all of D. Maybe giving up on some things 
> and finishing/fixing others would be a better strategy? I think 
> so, which is why I think DasBetterC is the most appealing thing 
> I've seen in D lately.

+1

But don't be too optimistic about BetterC...

Honestly, considering D's leadership current priorities, I don't 
see how it could become soon a true C++ or Go competitor, even 
with the half-baked BetterC initiative...

For instance, I've suggested they consider using reference 
counting as an alternative default memory management scheme, and 
add it to the lists of scolarship and crowdsourced project, and 
of course they have added all the other suggestion, but not this 
one. What a surprise ;)

Despite this is probably one of the most used allocation 
management scheme in typical C++ development, as this drastically 
reduces the risks of memory leaks and dangling pointers...

Anyway, meanwhile D remains a fantastic strongly-typed scripting 
language for file processing and data analysis, and its recent 
adoption at Netflix has once again clearly proved it...