The "no gc" crowd

[Tourist]

On Tuesday, 8 October 2013 at 15:43:46 UTC, ponce wrote:
> At least on Internet forums, there seems to be an entire 
> category of people dismissing D immediately because it has a GC.
>
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1nxs2i/the_state_of_rust_08/ccne46t
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1nxs2i/the_state_of_rust_08/ccnddqd
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1nsxaa/when_performance_matters_comparing_c_and_go/cclqbqw
>
> The subject inevitably comes in every reddit thread like it was 
> some kind of show-stopper.
>
> Now I know first-hand how much work avoiding a GC can give 
> (http://blog.gamesfrommars.fr/2011/01/25/optimizing-crajsh-part-2-2/).
>
> Yet with D the situation is different and I feel that criticism 
> is way overblown:
> - first of all, few people will have problems with GC in D at 
> all
> - then minimizing allocations can usually solve most of the 
> problems
> - if it's still a problem, the GC can be completely disabled, 
> relevant language features avoided, and there will be no GC 
> pause
> - this work of avoiding allocations would happen anyway in a 
> C++ codebase
> - I happen to have a job with some hardcore optimized C++ 
> codebase and couldn't care less that a GC would run provided 
> there is a way to minimize GC usage (and there is)
>
> Whatever rational rebutal we have it's never heard.
> The long answer is that it's not a real problem. But it seems 
> people want a short answer. It's also an annoying fight to have 
> since so much of it is based on zero data.
>
> Is there a plan to have a standard counter-attack to that kind 
> of overblown problems?
> It could be just a solid blog post or a @nogc feature.

I thought about an alternative approach:
Instead of using a (yet another) annotation, how about 
introducing a flag similar to -cov, which would output lines in 
which the GC is used.
This information can be used by an IDE to highlight those lines. 
Then you could quickly navigate through your performance-critical 
loop and make sure it's clean of GC.