You don't like GC? Do you?

[Stanislav Blinov]

On Saturday, 13 October 2018 at 13:17:41 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:

>> Then five years later, try and hunt down that mysterious heap 
>> corruption. Caused by some destructor calling into buggy 
>> third-party code. Didn't want to think about that one either?
>
> That hasn't happened to me.

It rarely does indeed. Usually it's someone else that has to sift 
through your code and fix your bugs years later. Because by that 
time you're long gone on another job, happily writing more code 
without thinking about it.

>> There is no "sometimes" here. You're writing programs for 
>> specific machines. All. The. Time.
>
> I am not. The last time I wrote code for a specific machine it 
> was for my 386, probably around 1995.

Yes you are. Or what, you're running your executables on a 1990 
issue calculator? :P Somehow I doubt that.

>>>> Precisely where in memory your data is, how it got there and 
>>>> how it's laid out should be bread and butter of any D 
>>>> programmer.
>>>
>>> Of any D programmer writing code that's performance sensitive.
>>
>> All code is performance sensitive.
>
> If that were true, nobody would write code in Python. And yet...

Nobody would write code in Python if Python didn't exist. That it 
exists means there's a demand. Because there are an awful lot of 
folks who just "don't want to think about it".
Remember 2000s? Everybody and their momma was a developer. Web 
developer, Python, Java, take your pick. Not that they knew what 
they were doing, but it was a good time to peddle crap.
Now, Python in an of itself is not a terrible language. But 
people write *system* tools and scripts with it. WTF? I mean, if 
you could care less how the machine works, you have *no* business 
developing *anything* for an OS.

>> If it's not speed, it's power consumption. Or memory. Or I/O.
>
> Not if it's good enough as it is. Which, in my my experience, 
> is frequently the case. YMMV.

That is not a reason to intentionally write *less* efficient code.

>> "Not thinking" about any of that means you're treating your 
>> power champion horse as if it was a one-legged pony.
>
> Yes. I'd rather the computer spend its time than I mine. I 
> value the latter far more than the former.

And what if your code wastes someone else's time at some later 
point? Hell with it, not your problem, right?

>> Advocating the "not thinking" approach makes you an outright 
>> evil person.
>
> Is there meetup for evil people now that I qualify? :P

Any gathering of like-minded programmers will do.