D on next-gen consoles and for game development

[Paulo Pinto]

On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 00:46:18 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> On Tue, 28 May 2013 20:40:03 -0400, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>
>
>> ObjC and WinRT are both used successfully on embedded 
>> hardware, I'm really
>> wondering if this is the way to go for embedded in D.
>> V8 uses an incremental collector (somehow?), which I've been 
>> saying is
>> basically mandatory for embedded/realtime use. Apparently 
>> Google agree.
>> Clearly others have already had this quarrel, their 
>> resolutions are worth
>> consideration.
>
> An interesting thing to note, Apple tried garbage collection 
> with Obj-C, but only on MacOS, and it's now been deprecated 
> since automatic reference counting was introduced [1].  It 
> never was on iOS.
>
> So that is a telling omission I think.
>
> -Steve
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Garbage_collection

The main reason was that the GC never worked properly given the C 
underpinnings of Objective-C.

Too many libraries failed to work properly with GC enabled, plus 
you needed to fill your code with GC friendly annotations.

So I imagine Apple tried to find a compromises that would work 
better in a language with C "safety".

Even that is only supported at the Objective-C language level and 
it requires both compiler support and that objects inherit from 
NSObject as top most class, as far as I am aware.

Anyway it is way better than pure manual memory management.

--
Paulo