Future of D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2020 at 07:33:30PM +0000, Max Haughton via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> I really think properly killing the GC would give us a big boost in
> fresh blood to the community. It would still be there, but it's a huge
> turn off to new users.

Honestly, IMNSHO the anti-GC crowd is only a vocal minority.  For most
normal applications the GC is actually a big plus.  (And I say this as
someone coming from a strong C/C++ background who used to hate anything
GC-related.)  It eliminates an entire class of bugs that are extremely
time-consuming to debug and work around, and cleans up your internal
APIs in a significant way that allows clean integration of a lot of
components, without constantly having to fiddle with low-level memory
allocation details at every turn.

And I'm almost 100% certain that if D were to eliminate the GC tomorrow,
we would not see a big increase in users -- the naysayers will merely
move on to the next thing to hate.  Probably the lack of native
refcounting / borrowing support.  Or the state of `shared`.  Or any of
various favorite whipping boys that we love to pick on.


T

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