Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers

[Carl Sturtivant]

On Friday, 5 April 2024 at 16:40:06 UTC, Carl Sturtivant wrote:
> What we see in the dlang forums related to the above group are 
> such soft-real-time programmers who have labored and 
> successfully overcome or bypassed these difficulties with D's 
> GC in one way or another for their situation.
>
> This is a biased sample! The presence of these successes 
> strongly suggests a larger group who failed to go to D, with 
> the successes the minority who got in. Those that penetrated 
> the armor and those who were deflected. It takes something 
> extra to penetrate the armor, so we might reasonably think that 
> the deflected are in the majority, with the successes being the 
> tip of the iceberg.
>
> D is deterring a class of people that are very much operating 
> in the spirit of D from joining the D community and creating 
> new things that in turn widen positive attitudes to the 
> language out there.
>
> Imagine this: what if D had such an ace GC for the last decade? 
> Perception and use of D would be entirely different to its 
> present state; soft-real-time applications would abound, with a 
> wide community of pro-D game programmers talking in the forums.
>
> Just like ImportC being a game changer, ace GC is a game(!) 
> changer. It's just harder to see this, but it is so.

Unfortunately the people I allude to above are not a part of the 
D community because the STW GC is not good enough for their 
purposes --- or they were convinced by the anti-GC crowd that 
this is the case.

So the D community is therefore host to a bunch of the anti-GC 
crowd without pushback from them. Instead they have done their 
soft-real-time work in Java, C#, ... with ace GC, and their 
successes are not presented here to bolster the strategic 
argument that a new ace GC of that variety is a necessary 
game-changer for D. It's catch-22.

Anti-GC crowd:
Don't straw-man this: none of this says that you HAVE to use GC 
in D. There is no reason to oppose an ace GC for D on those 
grounds.