D programming language popularity

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On Sunday, 8 November 2020 at 15:04:33 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> Or just ARC, which I would prefer if done with global static 
> analysis.

+1 I learned Swift a while ago, mostly because I like the idea of 
ARC. (I came to the conclusion that I don't like Swift btw^^).

People often dismiss it because it's slower than tracing GC, but 
there is more to it.
Obviously lower memory usage and deterministic destruction.

The real killer feature of ARC is imho that you can use it to 
implement value semantics with copy on write.
Swift does it for arrays. Semantically you pass by value, but it 
will only duplicate the array if you write to it and the refcount 
is greater one.
You can also use this to implement classes with value semantics 
(with a little bit boilerplate).