D on quora ...

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Friday, 6 October 2017 at 17:27:03 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> Why is GC a problem?
>
>
> T


--
> **** Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about 
> it!  -- Mark Twain**

Are you sure your quotes are randomly generated ??

Jonathan Davis wrote:
"We don't want D's standard library to rely on the GC when it 
doesn't need to, but there are language features that require it 
and really couldn't work with it, and there are cases where it's 
going to be involved by default for @safety reasons."

Perception is so important when people are making decisions about 
something they don't know.  (As Walter says, you have to write 
tens of sloc in a language to really see it's benefits.  They 
won't be so evident if you write D like the languages you know).

So I think the GC series has been very helpful.

But it might also be helpful to be very explicit on the functions 
that can and can't be called with nogc (I mean a top level 
overview in the docs) because it's one of the remaining sources 
of FUD that people say "yeah but you can't use large parts of the 
standard library without the GC".

And for things that are useful and easiest done with GC it would 
be nice to have an alternative that doesn't depend on the GC - if 
for no other reason than to address objections.  So the answer is 
then "yes - you're right, these X functions depend on the GC, but 
there are similar ones that don't".  (Walter already started that 
for functions that use the GC for purely legacy reasons but I 
mean for more difficult cases too.  I know Weka wrote their own 
versions of some std.algorithm functions for example).  Many 
things aren't much work, but when you have a lot to do, even 
small frictions can have big consequences.

So it's also a documentation question - it's not that easy from 
the outside last time I looked to see just how easy 
std.experimental.allocator is to use.