My wish for 2015...

[Jonathan Marler via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 20 December 2014 at 22:11:35 UTC, Xinok wrote:
> I'm going to make a stark proposal to the you all, the 
> community and all D users as whole. I wish for us to set an 
> ultimate goal to be made top priority and complete by the end 
> of next year. My wish is to resolve the issue of memory 
> management for D by the end of 2015. This is a significant 
> issue that has affected most of us at one point or another. I 
> think this gives D a bad rap more than anything else and is a 
> point of contention for many, especially those with a 
> background in C/C++.
>
> I think the problem of memory management can be reduced to two 
> points:
> (1) The garbage collector for D is sub-par.
> (2) There are too many implicit allocations in Phobos.
>
> I think three goals need to be met for the problem of memory 
> management to be satisfied:
> (1) We need a precise garbage collector. The fact that a 
> garbage-collected language experiences memory leaks truly 
> reflects poorly on on D.
> (2) Furthermore, we need to improve the performance of the 
> garbage collector. There are some things the developer can do 
> to reduce the time and frequency collection cycles, but the 
> current situation is far from optimal.
> (3) We need a viable alternative to the garbage collection. 
> Whether that be allocators, ref counting, or full-fledged 
> manual memory management, there is great demand for the ability 
> to use D without the GC with little hassle.
>
> I sincerely believe that this is the greatest issue facing D 
> today and something that should have been resolved a long time 
> ago. The fact that relatively simple programs can crash with 
> out-of-memory errors (especially 32-bit executables) and 
> high-performance code experiences frequent or lengthy 
> collection cycles means we have a bad situation on our hands.
>
> Things like @nogc are a start but much more needs to be done. 
> I'm not hoping for an optimal solution, nor am I expecting a 
> state-of-the-art garbage collector. I think we should simply 
> aim for "good enough". Then once we have a better memory 
> management scheme, we can begin incorporating these changes 
> into Phobos.
>
> What do you all think? Can we make improving memory management 
> the top priority for 2015 with the goal of developing an 
> adequate solution by the end of next year?

This may only be a personal opinion but I also agree that memory 
management should be made the #1 priority.  That being said, in 
order to make this a priority it would be great to see more 
organization when it comes to D development.  A simple 
prioritized list of features and developers currently working on 
them would be a great start:)  I like the summary of features and 
completely agree.