Future of memory management in D

Ola Fosheim Grøstad ola.fosheim.grostad at gmail.com
Wed Nov 17 23:18:08 UTC 2021


On Wednesday, 17 November 2021 at 23:01:44 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> That isn't not what happened, people did demand @nogc back 
> before it existed and considered it necessary. (I was a sceptic 
> and am now an avid user of @nogc).

I am sorry if my memory is off, but I thought people suggested a 
command-line switch for nogc and that Walter came up with the 
idea for the attribute. I could be wrong as this is ten years 
ago! I never thought it was essential, let me put it that way. I 
thought it was a nice feature that confirmed that Walter *wants* 
programmers to view D as proper system programming language. 
Which is significant to what could happen down the road, but not 
a replacement for compiler backed no-gc memory management.

> GC in D did receive many improvements over the years: @nogc, 
> speed and space enhancements, -profile=gc... A bit surprised by 
> the disinformation on this thread.

There has been many improvements, but that does not change the 
O(N) limitation and the fact that it essentially is a 
Boehm-collector like C++ has. Almost no projects use that one. 
And that says a lot of what system level programmers look for.


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