Old Quora post: D vs Go vs Rust by Andrei Alexandrescu

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 3 January 2018 at 19:42:32 UTC, Ali wrote:
> That was not a comment about GC implementations in general, it 
> was about D's GC implementation, check the original post on 
> Quora, and read the statement right before this one, maybe it 
> will make this point clearer

I read it when it was posted… D does get the key benefits of a GC 
(catching reference cycles and convenient memory management), but 
it also gets the disadvantages of a 1960s GC implementation.

There are many ways to fix this, which has been discussed to 
death before (like thread local garbage collection), but there is 
no real decision making going on to deal with it.  Because to 
deal with it you should also consider semantic/types system 
changes.

The chosen direction seems to be to slowly make everything 
reference counted instead, which doesn't really improve things a 
whole lot IMO. At best you'll end up where Swift is at. Not bad, 
but also not great.

> And it raises many concerns I see in many post by people who 
> are a lot less involved with D, like the issues with the GC and 
> the illusive vision

Well, but leadership is about addressing the concerns and making 
some (unpopular) decisions to get here.  *shrug*

But I don't really care anymore, to be honest… Several other 
compiled languages are exploring new directions, so I'm currently 
content to watch where they are going…

I personally think D would be in a stronger position if some hard 
decisions were made, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon. 
So there we are.