Why many programmers don't like GC?
ddcovery
antoniocabreraperez at gmail.com
Tue Jan 19 10:36:13 UTC 2021
On Monday, 18 January 2021 at 15:18:40 UTC, aberba wrote:
> From my experiencing freelancing, I've come to see that a large
> portion of clients' decision stems from other things like
> familiarity and ecosystem (packages, frameworks, vendor/cloud
> support, engineering hiring pool, consultants/support
> availability, tooling, marketing/popularity/fomo/community,
> etc)... including things that usually comes from the community
> and stakeholders. For D we don't really have any measure of
> community size. Only looking at the forum can be misleading.
I agree. Ecosystem is one of the most important things to take
the choice. In particular, when a team of developers need to
engage a new project they don't just talk about language: they
talk about process model, frameworks, libraries... and tooling
for solving common development/testing/deployment tasks (i.e.:
debugging).
Go and Rust are really clever about its paradigms decisions and
no one (as far as I perceive) is discussing if GC must be removed
from Go or added to Rust: developers see what language offers
them and they decide.
D toke it's key decisions in the past: of course it is a
"generalist" language trying to convince C or C++ developers, but
this is really frustrating when there is no a way to perform
decent debugging in linux with vscode (like
https://youtu.be/X2tM21nmzfk?t=352) while the community is
dedicated to discussing the sex of angels (multiple inheritance,
GC/no GC, exceptions/no exceptions, ...).
A good friend developer told me months ago: "If you are
experienced with Node, C# or Scala and you expect to find their
functionalities in other language like D, you just will get
frustrated: adapt to what the language offers you or jump to
other options".
D is D: take it or not. This language is not the holy grail. If
D is not C++ and you love to work with C++, just work with C++
(or take a try with Rust and it's Ownership memory model if D
pros are not enough for you). If D is not C and you love to work
with C, just work with C (or take a try with Go and it's GC if D
is not enough for you), but think about the thousands of
experienced developers that where looking for something mature to
work with and found that D was not an option.
> Also maybe the GC and other complaints (genuine or not), which
> I'm also a culprit, might actually be a contributing to
> people's first impression of D when they visit the forums. I
> have a strongly suspicious of this.
Me too: I'm absolutely convinced.
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