Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers

[bachmeier]

On Thursday, 4 April 2024 at 15:42:24 UTC, ryuukk_ wrote:

> There is no anti-GC crowd
>
> I will not speak for other people, so i will speak for myself

There's definitely an anti-GC crowd. Most of them don't use D, 
but they're happy to vandalize discussions about D.

> I advocate for: GC as a library and core language as pay as you 
> go, so i can use a great language without people making it 
> annoying to use

> Imagine:
>
> ```D
> int[] myarray;
> create_array(allocator, myarray, length: 16);
>
>
> int[int] mymap;
> create_map(allocator, mymap)
>
>
> // or fall back to using GC for casual scripting
> ```

But once you have to "fall back" to the GC, you've lost anyone 
that wants to do scripting.

> No need to pick a clan, be smart, enable people

But in your example, you have picked a clan, those that enjoy 
dealing with memory management.

> The absolute best is what Zig is doing by encouraging people to 
> use/request for an allocator

Why would I care about an allocator? These are the specs of the 
computer that will run my program:

Memory: 125.5 GiB
Processor: 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-13900 × 32

If I want to write a program that changes a few lines in a 
markdown file, for instance, there's no reason to introduce 
overhead.

> Question to pro-GC crowd, why does it take 2 seconds to create 
> the array?

Why are you using the GC if that's the code you need to write? 
Although if I'm writing a script and it's run one time once a 
day, even that isn't a big deal.