Componentizing D's garbage collector

[sunspyre]

On Sunday, 12 January 2014 at 10:27:42 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
> [...] Adding concurrency would also be nice...

I just want to point out that from an outer perspective, this is 
a really really *really* big deal.

By far the most common arguments I've heard against D are:

1. library availability (derelict, deimos now)
2. community size and impetus (getting there!)
3. shared druntime/phobos so Hello World isn't 800kb (getting 
there?)
4. garbage collector which is only possible to opt out of by 
writing C

The very reliance of the garbage collector, regardless of how far 
between the stop-the-world sweeps are, is a showstopper for many 
people. They hear GC and think Java pauses. Being able to 
honestly claim "well it runs concurrently in a separate thread 
and doesn't[*] incur any performance penalty" would be the single 
biggest leap to greater adoption D could take at this point. 
Maybe barring "it prints money", but only maybe.

It may be less of a *technical* problem than, say, this or that 
bug in the type system, or the identity crisis of shared. But 
fixing those would not make for a *twentieth* of the marketing 
that a concurrent GC would. Fixing those would make people stay 
-- introducing that GC would make people join.

Not saying that such bugs shouldn't get attention, I'm just 
saying that Bob would scroll past that link on /r/programming. In 
comparison, Lucarella's dconf slides were... *compelling*.



(P.S. many awkwardly long hugs to those culling allocations from 
druntime/phobos, you rock)