Would the ownership model make D lang as complicated as Rust?

[donallen]

On Saturday, 14 November 2020 at 05:33:24 UTC, joe wrote:
> In regards to this article 
> https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in-d/
>
> I have a couple of questions,
>
> 1. I was wondering if this is going to make D lang just as 
> complicated as Rust?
> 2. Would there be GC still if we use the ownership model?

I can't answer your questions, but I can offer some observations 
based on my experience porting a personal finance application, 
originally written in C, to Rust (about 10,000 lines of code).

I am retired from a long career in software development and 
project management. I wrote my first line of code 60 years ago. I 
have learned a lot of programming languages during all those 
years and I have never encountered anything as difficult to learn 
and use as Rust. Haskell is a walk in the park compared to Rust. 
Rust does what they say it will do -- deliver memory-safety 
without a garbage collector. But the incremental price you, the 
programmer, must pay for the absence of a GC is significant.

Consideration of Rust require careful cost-benefit analysis. If 
you are about to write something that requires absolutely 
predictable latency, where you would normally reach for something 
like C or C++, then Rust is probably a better choice (I'm 
ignoring the issue of deadlines and whether you already know the 
language). They have done an excellent job, given the design 
constraints they have chosen.

But if you are writing an ordinary application, such as my 
financial application, Rust is not appropriate, in my view (I 
suspected that going in, but I'm retired and also a bit of a 
programming language enthusiast, so I went ahead despite my 
doubts; had I been doing this in the real world of business, I 
like to think that the project manager part of me would have done 
something more sensible).

I don't know exactly how Walter intends to proceed with adding 
Rust-like move semantics to D, but the little I know suggests 
that it will be optional. If I'm right, that's very wise. Move 
semantics and no GC for those who really need it (justifying its 
cost) and the luxury of the GC for those who don't.