What's the go with the GC these days?

[Manu]

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 12:55 AM Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> > It's obvious why it failed. I don't think comment on the merit of the
> > design has any relevance at all to that particular story.
> > The particulars of the design and whether it was good or not couldn't
> > have had less affect on the feature being ignored and/or rejected.
>
> It had a large effect in my experience. I'm an expert on near/far/etc, and I
> don't miss it like I don't miss EBCDIC. I was kinda glad to see Managed C++
> fail, so I wouldn't get any pressure to implement it.
>
> (I also recall programmers looking at it, and respond "two kinds of pointers?
> Blech." Not just me.)

But now we have heaps of pointers... just that they have ugly names.
Now we have std::unique_ptr<T>, std::shared_ptr<T>, std::auto_ptr<T>,
std::weak_ptr<T>
These are all just as equally 'multiple kinds of pointers' as `T^` was
for ARC pointers, except they have hideous names, instead of a nice
concise 1-byte syntax.

It's all irrelevant though, Nobody's asking for multiple pointer types
in D. All I want from language support for ARC in D, is an opInc/opDec
function which are called appropriately around assignments, and elided
appropriately.
copy ctor's can't offer this functionality.