Why does D rely on a GC?

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 18 August 2014 at 23:48:24 UTC, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> On 8/18/14, 8:51 AM, bearophile wrote:
>> Jonathan M Davis:
>>
>>> The biggest reason is memory safety. With a GC, it's possible 
>>> to make
>>> compiler guarantees about memory safety, whereas with
>>> manual memory management, it isn't.
>>
>> Unless you have a very smart type system and you accept some 
>> compromises
>> (Rust also uses a reference counter some some cases, but I 
>> think most
>> allocations don't need it).
>>
>> Bye,
>> bearophile
>
> It's very smart, yes. But it takes half an hour to compile the 
> compiler itself.

The compilation speed is caused by the C++ code in their compiler 
backend (LLVM), which gets compiled at least twice during the 
bootstraping process.

> And you have to put all those unwrap and types everywhere, I 
> don't think it's fun or productive that way.


There I fully agree. If they don't improve lifetime's usability, 
I don't see Rust being adopted by average developers.

--
Paulo