C's Biggest Mistake on Hacker News

[Ecstatic Coder]

On Wednesday, 25 July 2018 at 20:24:39 UTC, bpr wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 July 2018 at 17:23:40 UTC, Ecstatic Coder 
> wrote:
>> But don't be too optimistic about BetterC...
>
> I'm too old to get optimistic about these things. In the very 
> best case, D has quite an uphill battle for market share. Any 
> non mainstream language does. If I were a betting man, I'd bet 
> on Rust.
>
>> 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...
>
> There are a few ways I can see, and doubtless others can see 
> different ones. Here's one: use Mir and BetterC to write a 
> TensorFlow competitor for use in developing and deploying ML 
> models. I'm sure you can shoot holes in that idea, but you get 
> the point. Try lots of things and see what works, and keep 
> doing more of those things. Worked for Python.
>
>> 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 ;)
>
> I'm pretty sure D leadership is pursuing such things. In fact,
>
> https://wiki.dlang.org/Vision/2018H1
>
> rather prominently mentions it.
>
>> 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...
>
> For this and similar uses, tracing GC is fine, better in fact 
> than the alternatives. I'm only making noise about betterC for 
> the cases where C++ dominates and tracing GC is a showstopper.
>
> In an alternative timeline, DasBtterC would have been released 
> before D with GC, and the main libraries would have been nogc, 
> and maybe there'd be a split between raw pointers and traced 
> refs (like Nim and Modula-3) and then maybe there'd have been 
> no strong desire for Rust since D could have filled that niche.

+1