Temporally safe by default

[Bruce Carneal]

On Tuesday, 9 April 2024 at 08:16:22 UTC, Dukc wrote:
> On Monday, 8 April 2024 at 19:59:55 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew 
> Cattermole wrote:
>> No library features can stop it either, unless you want to 
>> check ref counts (which won't work cos ya know graphs).
>
> I think you are losing sight of the big picture.
>
> The big picture is we already have a fine safety mechanism for 
> majority of the cases, the garbage collector! It also just 
> works with graphs.
>
> ...

One way to frame the "big picture" of language design is as an 
optimization problem across multiple concerns {safety, 
performance, testability, scalability, deployability, 
ease-of-use}.

Traditionally, language designers have weighted some of these 
concerns much much more heavily than others.  The D community at 
large has not, leading to, IMO, a very enjoyable and improving 
language.

We're not in an either/or situation here.  We can certainly 
improve GC and we can explore the space between our, improving, 
GC and malloc()...

I'm not an expert in this area but I do think that there are big 
wins for D to be had here.

On a side note, I find the Mojo approach to memory-mgmt 
appealing.  They've certainly embraced the {performance X 
ease-of-use X safety} trifecta.