2011/12/11 Paulo Pinto <pjmlp@progtools.org>
Am 10.12.2011 21:35, schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu:
On 12/10/11 2:22 PM, maarten van damme wrote:
Just for fun I
wanted to create a program as little as possible, compiled without
garbage collector/phobos/... and it turned out that compiling without
garbage collector is pretty much impossible (memory leaks all around the
place in druntime). dynamic linking for the d standard library would be
a great new option for a dmd release in the future :).

Using D without GC is an interesting direction, and dynamic linking
should be available relatively soon.


Andrei

As a long time beliver in systems programming languages with GC support
(Modula-3, Oberon, Sing#, ...), I think allowing this in D is the wrong direction.

Sure provinding APIs to control GC behavior makes sense, but not turn it
off, we already have enough languages to do systems programming without GC.

I was only trying it "for the fun of it", not to be used seriously. D should always have it's GC support built-in and have some functions to control it's behaviour (core.memory). But I think that D, beeing a systems programming language, should also be able to be used without GC. I don't mean phobos to be writtin without a GC in mind but druntime should be compilable with something like a -nogc flag that make it usable without GC.

There are a lot of users out there who think that a GC produces terribly slow programs, big hangs while collecting,... (thank java for that. Right now the java GC has been improved and it's extremely good but the memory stays :p)
Letting them know that D can be run without GC can be a good point. If they don't like it, they can turn it off.