GCs in the news

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 17 July 2014 at 09:57:09 UTC, currysoup wrote:
> On Thursday, 17 July 2014 at 09:26:38 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On Thursday, 17 July 2014 at 09:20:36 UTC, Russel Winder via 
>> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> It appears still to be a general meme that performance 
>>> required no GC
>>> and GC mean poor performance. The debate has been restarted 
>>> on the Go
>>> mailing list under the banner "go without garbage collector". 
>>> The
>>> response to will Go remove the garbage collector was somewhat
>>> unequivocal: nope.
>>
>> That's good news in a way. If a big company accepts GC and the 
>> Go crowd go with it (pardon the pun), then it will find more 
>> acceptance (as Paulo pointed out in a different thread).
>
> It's not about "acceptance", it's about the reality that a GC 
> is not a universal solution to memory management.

Point taken. But as has been said before 90-95% of all apps can 
live happily with GC, and if you want, you can still go bare 
metal with D. The security GC offers should not be underestimated 
either. With "acceptance" I meant that people see "it cannot be 
that bad after all for *most* applications". The GC issue is 
often cited as a D-eal breaker. I understand that there are 
applications that need total control over the memory. But those 
apps have always been programmed in C or any other 
close-to-the-machine language, and even then programmers (in 
gaming for example) have to use additional tricks and hacks to 
squeeze out every little bit of performance. What D has to do is 
to facilitate control over the memory, but I still consider it a 
systems programming language due to the fact that it has many 
things to offer as regard the direct interaction with the machine 
that Java and C# don't. Can you write a device drive in Java, if 
yes, tell me how, I'm interested.

> Just from watching a few of the DConf 2014 talks, if you want 
> performance you avoid the GC at all costs (even if that means 
> allocating into huge predefined buffers). Once you're going to 
> these lengths to avoid garbage collection it begs the question, 
> why are you even using this language? Within this community the 
> question is rhetorical but to outsiders I feel it's a major 
> concern.

Don't know if it's really a "major concern" or the favorite weak 
spot that C++ et. al guys like to flog to death in order to 
distract from the many strengths that D has (in comparison with 
C++ et al.) The answer is always "D has GC, it's the Devil, don't 
touch it!" Also, let's put a little faith in the brilliant 
developers behind D, I'm sure there's a huge performance boost 
for D around the corner.