Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[Carl Vogel via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 20:28:47 UTC, poliklosio wrote:
> On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 15:06:49 UTC, Carl Vogel wrote:
>> (...) Also, the idea that more people will adopt D if you just 
>> "get rid of the GC" ignores the fact that you don't just "get 
>> rid of the GC," you replace it with another memory management 
>> scheme (manual, RAII, RC). If you replace all the parts of the 
>> language and phobos that rely on GC with, e.g., a poor 
>> implementation of RC, then you're just going to get another 
>> round of complaints, and no real adoption.
>
> I think you are going to get some adoption it you replace good 
> GC with clunky RC.
> The key difference is a call to a function that uses GC is 
> incomplete: some of it will execute later, after the call has 
> finished.
> On the other hand a call to an equivalent function that uses RC 
> has only local (in time) consequences: once you finished the 
> call, it stopped executing. If it returned something that needs 
> to be freed later, you know what it is.
> Of course people can write arbitrarily messed up things like 
> singletons etc. but I'm not counting those because good 
> libraries are usually free of those.
> This means you have control over all the OTHER code, however 
> inefficient the call is.
> Hence, the second is acceptable in low-latency code, but the 
> first is not.

I get that and agree. My point was a different one -- that these 
conversations are about a totally hypothetical RC implementation 
that we all imagine is perfect, and so we just discuss 
theoretical GC vs RC tradeoffs. The real one that gets made is 
going to have bugs and unexpected corner cases. So the risk is 
that at some point we'll all run to reddit and say "Tada, no more 
GC" and folks will then just say "D has RC, but it's buggy and 
unreliable and doesn't work when [insert anecdote]"

Maybe that won't be so---maybe the new memory management regime 
will be perfect and elegant and have no nasty surprises. But I 
feel a real "grass is greener" sense, when as many other has 
pointed out, the current GC could use a lot of love, which would 
solve problems for a lot of current users.