D is nice whats really wrong with gc??

[bachmeier]

On Friday, 22 December 2023 at 12:53:44 UTC, bomat wrote:

> If you use (or even feel tempted to use) a GC, it means that 
> you don't care about your memory. Neither about its layout nor 
> its size, nor when chunks of it are allocated or deallocated, 
> etc.
> And if you don't care about these things, you should not call 
> yourself a programmer. You are the reason why modern software 
> sucks and everything gets slower and slower despite the 
> processors getting faster and faster. In fact, you probably 
> should get another job, like flooring inspector or something. :)

Given how fast computers are today, the folks that focus on 
memory and optimizing for performance might want to apply for 
jobs as flooring inspectors, because they're often solving 
problems from the 1990s. That's not to say it's never needed, but 
the number of cases where idiomatic D, Go, or Java will be too 
slow is shrinking rapidly. And there's a tradeoff. In return for 
solving a problem that doesn't exist, you get bugs, increased 
development time, and difficulty changing approaches.

I say this as I'm in the midst of porting C code to D. The 
biggest change by far is deleting line after line of manual 
memory management. Changing anything in that codebase would be 
miserable.