A D vs. Rust example

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 26 October 2022 at 21:17:01 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
> And are you aware that when and if there is a real-time 
> requirement, you can turn off the GC?

Turning off the GC is not an option that will work out as there 
is no period of time that isn't "realtime", but you can keep GC 
managed objects on a separate thread. That approach only makes 
sense if you can separate out and shield significant work 
suitable for GC from the other work that has to be done.

For the most part using owning pointers and arenas is a more 
flexible approach if you cannot use a generic GC for most of your 
program.  Browsers do use a GC for resources that are "owned" by 
javascript, but the browser code then have full control over the 
collection strategy. That is not the case for a generic 
run-of-the-
mill language solution.

The moment you have to micromanage a large number of objects by 
pinning and unpinning them because they are leaving the GC 
context you might find that the benefits of using a managed 
solution is lost. So the overall complexity goes down with 
choosing something more homogeneous (like owning pointers).