D is nice whats really wrong with gc??

[IGotD-]

On Monday, 18 December 2023 at 16:44:11 UTC, Bkoie wrote:
> just look at this i know this is overdesign im just trying to 
> get a visual on how a api can be design im still new though but 
> the fact you can build an api like this and it not break it is 
> amazing.
>
> but what is with these ppl and the gc?
> just dont allocate new memory or invoke,
> you can use scopes to temporry do stuff on immutable slices 
> that will auto clean up
> the list goes on
>
> and you dont need to use pointers at all.......!!
>
> i honesty see nothing wrong with gc,
>

I don't think there is any wrong having GC in language either and 
upcoming languages also show that as a majority of the have some 
form of GC. GC is here to stay regardless.

So what is the problem with D? The problem with D is that it is 
limited to what type of GC it can support. Right now D only 
supports stop the world GC which is quickly becoming unacceptable 
on modern systems. Sure it was fine when when we had dual core 
CPUs but today desktop PCs can have 32 execution units (server 
CPUs can have an insane amount of of them like 128). Stopping 32 
execution (potentially even more if you have more threads) units 
is just unacceptable, which not only takes a lot of time but a 
very clumsy approach on modern systems.

What GC should D then support? In my opinion, all of them. Memory 
management is a moving target and I don't know how it will look 
like in 10 years. Will cache snoop be viable for example, will 
the cores be clustered so that snoops are only possible within 
them etc? D needs a more future proof language design when it 
comes to memory management.

Because of this it is important that D can as seamless as 
possible support different types of GC types. Exposing raw 
pointers in the language for GC allocated type was a big mistake 
in the D language design which I think should be rectified. About 
all other new languages have opaque pointers/reference types in 
order to hide the GC mechanism and so that other GC algorithms 
like reference counting can be used.

This is a an F- in language design.