Remember the Vasa! by Bjarne Stroustrup

[Tony]

With regard to having, say, a GUI written with garbage 
collection, and then needing to have non-garbage collected code 
to process audio, could that not be done with GC D calling C? 
And, if there was a garbage-collected D (D for Applications) and 
a non-GC D (D for Systems Programming), couldn't one be linked 
with the other? And before you say "but it should all be together 
coming out of one compiler" - take a moment to Remember the Vasa!


I don't seriously expect two D-ish compilers, but it does seem to 
make more sense with regard to adding automatic reference 
counting to a language that already has garbage collection, as 
well as working to remove garbage collection from the standard 
library. Presumably at the beginning and for much of D's history, 
garbage collection was a premier selling point, along with OOP.

But with regard to various compile-time stuff and function 
annotations and other things that didn't exist years ago, has 
that resulted in noticeably faster programming and/or noticeably 
higher code quality by those utilizing it?