Future of D

[Paul Backus]

On Sunday, 13 December 2020 at 19:33:30 UTC, Max Haughton wrote:
>
> I really think properly killing the GC would give us a big 
> boost in fresh blood to the community. It would still be there, 
> but it's a huge turn off to new users. That and a bit of 
> blog-spam, I constantly see articles for new languages that are 
> (frankly) a bit rubbish compared to various D features but 
> because they are post-(new generation of languages) they are 
> "cooler"

As far as I know, the major obstacles to making the GC truly 
pay-as-you-go are things like

- stabilization of std.experimental.allocator
- allocator-aware containers in Phobos (à la emsi_containers [1])
- @safe reference counting in Phobos or Druntime (à la automem 
[2])

Unfortunately, to my knowledge, nobody is actively working on 
these, and the D Language Foundation has not made any effort to 
prioritize them. Which is a shame, since so much of the work has 
already been done.

[1] https://code.dlang.org/packages/emsi_containers
[2] https://code.dlang.org/packages/automem