D is crap

[Alessandro Ogheri]

On Monday, 11 July 2016 at 09:30:37 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Sunday, 10 July 2016 at 03:25:16 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
> wrote:
>>
>> Just like there is no C++ book that does not rant about how 
>> great RAII is... What do you expect from a language evangelic? 
>> The first Java implementation Hotspot inherited its technology 
>> from StrongTalk, a Smalltalk successor. It was not a Java 
>> phenomenon, and FWIW both Lisp, Simula and Algol68 were 
>> garbage collected.
>
> Please stop intentionally missing the point. I don't care if 
> Leonardo Da Vinci already had invented GC - which wouldn't 
> surprise me -

Leonardo Da Vinci was coding in Haskell but he was calling it 
Haskellius idioma programatoribus...

but this is not the point. My point is that GC
> became a big thing in the late 90ies early 2000s which is in 
> part owed to Java having become the religion of the day (not 
> Lisp or SmallTalk)[1]. D couldn't have afforded not to have GC 
> when it first came out. It was expected of a (new) language to 
> provide GC by then - and GC had become a selling point for new 
> languages.
>
> [1] And of course computers had become more powerful and could 
> handle the overhead of GC better than in the 80ies.
>
>> What was "new" with Java was compile-once-run-everywhere. 
>> Although, that wasn't new either, but it was at least 
>> marketable as new.
>>
>>> Java was the main catalyst for GC - or at least for people 
>>> demanding it. Practically everybody who had gone through IT 
>>> courses, college etc. with Java (and there were loads) wanted 
>>> GC. It was a given for many people.
>>
>> Well, yes, of course Java being used in universities created a 
>> demand for Java and similar languages. But GC languages were 
>> extensively used in universities before Java.
>
>>> Yes, it didn't last long. But the fact that they bothered to 
>>> introduce it, shows you how big GC was/is.
>>
>> No, it shows how demanding manual reference counting was in 
>> Objective-C on regular programmers. GC is the first go to 
>> solution for easy memory management, and has been so since the 
>> 60s. Most high level languages use garbage collection.
>
> It wasn't demanding. I wrote a lot of code in Objective-C and 
> it was perfectly doable. You even have features like 
> `autorelease` for return values. The thing is that Apple had 
> become an increasingly popular platform and more and more 
> programmers were writing code for OS X. So they thought, they'd 
> make it easier and reduce potential memory leaks (introduced by 
> not so experienced Objective-C coders) by adding GC, especially 
> because a lot of programmers expected GC "in this day and age".