My Long Term Vision for the D programming language

[IGotD-]

On Friday, 19 November 2021 at 12:22:05 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>
> Swift as natural evolution from Objective-C, with 1:1 
> interoperability goals with the Cocoa ecosystem and Objective-C 
> runtime, naturally had double down on ARC.
>
> The alternative with a tracing GC would require an engineering 
> effort similar to how .NET interops with COM,
>
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/native-interop/cominterop
>
> So beware when discussing what D should adopt from other 
> languages, usually there is more to the whole story than just 
> RC vs tracing GC.

I think it is besides the point whatever is the best, tracing GC 
or reference counted GC or whatever. The truth is that both have 
their advantages and disadvantages.

The problem for D is that the language is limited to tracing GC 
and I think it is a mistake. The goal should be to create a 
language that can potentially support any GC type, preferably 
with as little change as possible when switching between them. 
This also might include the support for compacting the heap.

It's challenging to create a language that supports all these 
different types but I think D should have gone a step higher in 
the abstraction in order to be more versatile.

It is also clear that memory management is something that is 
still evolving and maybe in the future someone might come up with 
an even better method that is interesting for D to adopt. That's 
why the language design should take that into consideration.