Future of D 2.x as stable/bug fix, and what's next for D 3.x

IGotD- nise at nise.com
Wed Sep 2 09:06:16 UTC 2020


On Wednesday, 2 September 2020 at 01:49:23 UTC, Eljay wrote:
>
> Some obstacles as I see them are:
>   * no corporate/government/academic sponsor backing the 
> language
>   * garbage collection
>

The biggest mistakes of D is not that it is garbage collected but 
that it painted itself into a corner requiring a tracing GC which 
prevents it from using other GC methods.

Either a language is garbage collected which means the 
runtime/compiler takes care of the memory management or it has 
manual memory management. Supporting both is in my opinion not 
realistic because designing libraries than can work in any 
environment is too complicated. This is an active choice that the 
library author must take if automatic memory management should be 
used or not.

You could say that in that case all D libraries must change to 
using manual memory management so that it can work in any 
environment. However, this also affects the design of the 
interfaces and without garbage collection it will be prone for 
more memory bugs. Also I'm not sure anybody is up to the task 
rewriting entire runtime/phobos to use manual memory management.

I think that the work towards @nogc is a waste of time. @nogc 
environments are very specialized and there programmers tend to 
use their own special libraries as well for full control. The 
work should be focused towards plug and play GC and reference 
counting.



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