Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers

[Carl Sturtivant]

On Thursday, 4 April 2024 at 14:13:52 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew 
Cattermole wrote:
> It simply comes down to man power, nobody is willing to do the 
> work.
>
> There just isn't enough of a win here to make anyone motivated 
> to do it.

Not enough of a highly visible tactical win, no. However...

I'm just an occasional intense user of D. However, reading the 
forums, reading this thread again now specifically, I think it is 
possible to form a wider conclusion.

*There is a massive strategic win to having a fabulous 21st 
century GC for D, perfectly good for soft-real-time coding with 
no further ado, like the one used by the author of the article 
linked at the start of this thread.*

We might guess that some people who are trying to find the right 
tool for the job (their soft-real-time game for example), and who 
do not like manual memory management because of the additional 
drag it imposes on the programmer simply did not choose D even 
though they otherwise would were this ace GC present.

Instead they chose Java or C# or Go (but not C++ or Rust which 
they detest for the memory management administrative burden it 
imposes on the programmer and the general complicated nature of 
coding in such languages).

What we see in the dlang forums related to the above group are 
such soft-real-time programmers who have labored and successfully 
overcome or bypassed these difficulties with D's GC in one way or 
another for their situation.

This is a biased sample! The presence of these successes strongly 
suggests a larger group who failed to go to D, with the successes 
the minority who got in. Those that penetrated the armor and 
those who were deflected. It takes something extra to penetrate 
the armor, so we might reasonably think that the deflected are in 
the majority, with the successes being the tip of the iceberg.

D is deterring a class of people that are very much operating in 
the spirit of D from joining the D community and creating new 
things that in turn widen positive attitudes to the language out 
there.

Imagine this: what if D had such an ace GC for the last decade? 
Perception and use of D would be entirely different to its 
present state; soft-real-time applications would abound, with a 
wide community of pro-D game programmers talking in the forums.

Just like ImportC being a game changer, ace GC is a game(!) 
changer. It's just harder to see this, but it is so.