Temporally safe by default
Bruce Carneal
bcarneal at gmail.com
Tue Apr 9 14:20:22 UTC 2024
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.
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