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[Paulo Pinto]

On Saturday, 13 June 2020 at 13:00:35 UTC, JN wrote:
> On Saturday, 13 June 2020 at 10:43:41 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
>> On Friday, 12 June 2020 at 19:45:20 UTC, James Lu wrote:
>>> "Ask HN: Why do you use Rust, when D is available?" 
>>> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23494490
>>
>> It's funny how GC is repeatedly mentioned as a drawback of D, 
>> however it is never mentioned as a drawback of Nim. Does this 
>> have anything to do with that swapping out GC algorithms in 
>> Nim is much more easy than in D? In D you can't really swap GC 
>> algorithms by just changing a compiler option.
>
> I think there are three factors (never used Nim):
>
> 1) [citation needed] but I think Nim is less popular than D, so 
> it's below the radar. "There are only two kinds of languages: 
> the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
>
> 2) I think Nim attracts different types of programmers. Nim 
> seems to me like a mix of Python and Pascal and it seems these 
> kind of programmers are going towards it. D is openly courting 
> C++ programmers and many C++ programmers have elitist attitudes 
> towards GC.
>
> 3) I think Nim isn't really looking to offer any ways to avoid 
> automatic memory management, be it ARC or GC. D is. "How do I 
> manage memory in D?". There is always someone saying that you 
> don't have to use GC in D, there's betterC, @nogc, allocators. 
> Then someone always comes in to say half of standard library 
> doesn't work and most dub packages expect GC. In Nim, it's like 
> "how do I manage memory?", "oh, Nim handles that for you, enjoy 
> your stay".

Not only Nim, if you do iOS you have to deal with reference 
counting GC, on Android tracing GC (very few use cases are 
allowed for NDK) and on Windows .NET and reference counting GC 
for COM/UWP.

And there are companies like PTC and Aicas selling real time JVMs 
for industrial deployments, and I bet they still do have enough 
customers.

So where D fails short is maybe trying to offer all models, 
without having a corporate overloard that drives the sheeps into 
the barn, even if they come screeming all the way into it.