More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 6 May 2014 at 22:48:02 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Tuesday, 6 May 2014 at 19:18:08 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 6 May 2014 at 18:02:46 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
>>>
>>> It never occurred to you that people's libraries would be 
>>> published as part of a centralised repository with a tool 
>>> that manages dependencies?
>>
>> Hate to be the cynic, but how in the world do you expect 
>> people to even know about Dub or code.dlang.org in the first 
>> place?  I don't see it linked from any of the "obvious" places 
>> on dlang.org, and I can't even find a single _mention_ that we 
>> apparently have a package manager.  Nothing in the FAQ about 
>> "Contributing to D".  And as if all that wasn't enough, the 
>> "Links" page still points to digitalmars.com.
>>
>> From a normal user's standpoint, they simply don't exist.
>>
>>> It's pretty common-place in a variety of languages. 
>>> (https://rubygems.org/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi 
>>> http://www.cpan.org/ etc...).
>>>
>> It's rather disingenuous to invoke these three.
>>
>> Ruby: "Libraries" at the top on the home page links to 
>> https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/libraries/, which explains gem 
>> and links to rubygems
>> Python: Not super easy to see, but "PyPI" _is_ linked in the 
>> top bar.
>> Perl: "CPAN" in the top bar links to 
>> http://www.perl.org/cpan.html, which explains cpan ...and I 
>> think you can see where this is going.
>>
>> I love my package manager, but I'm going to have to agree with 
>> Manu's bewilderment here.
>>
>> -Wyatt
>
> I believe this is the case. If I did not stay vaguely informed 
> of the latest trends with the various popular dynamic 
> languages, i.e., Python, Ruby, NodeJS, basically anything 
> popular with the Silicon Valley hipsters (no offense to users 
> of those languages), I'd have no idea what a language-based 
> package manager is, much less why you'd want to use one when 
> the various *nix have it built in. If you work in the game 
> industry, then your primary language is probably C++ with a bit 
> of Lua on the side. Do those languages even *have* package 
> managers? Even if you understand how that all works, Dub isn't 
> advertised at all, as you said.

On Windows NuGet supports all Visual Studio languages, including
C++, since Visual Studio 2010.

For Lua there are LuaRocks and LuaDist.

A *nix package manager is brain dead idea for software
development as it ties the language libraries to the specific OS
one is using.

Good luck getting packages if the author did not consider your
OS. Specially if they are only available in binary format, as it
is standard in the enterprise world.

With a language pakage manager I can produce package XPTO that
will work on all OS, it won't conflict with the system packages,
specially important on servers used for CI of multiple projects.

--
Paulo