On Monday, 1 April 2024 at 20:45:25 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:

I am sure some people on this forum would refer me as "one of them" - and, by default, someone that "wants control of memory" being labeled as ignorant. That makes me the guy in the middle, right?

I think some people are viewing this as black or white. You love the GC or you hate it. This isn't some kind of religious group. Those that might categorize me as some OOP/GC hater, I could say the same for those that want to force the GC it on me.

I have D programs on servers. Some using a rich set of features... shock.. uses the GC. For others, they are written in BetterC.

What we have to remember is, in my opinion, is the Dlang is a unique programming language. Dlang has the opportunity of winning over many different sections of programmers. This is something other languages, especially higher level ones, do not have. If you want to go down the route of "but if you want to write a game or OS... this is not for you" seems like you are enforcing what you want from D and excluding users/developers who need to solve other problems. It isn't just you, but others who are web guys or app guys are happy to join in and agree.

I am not being bitter about it. The core team behind D are free to push whatever goals they wish for the language. If you want to go the route of "no gamers or OS guys" then make it clear. People are going to be argumentative about it on forums and it is not because "no-GC crowd will never be silenced" -- it is because people on this forum really care about the D programming language. I will agree that some people could word their points of view more professionally (and more respecfully of others) -- but you can tell that a number of members on this forum would take a bullet for D.

State the goals of D. Some people will dislike it and create posts about it but at the end, it comes down to 2 choices:-

1. Accept the goals and keep using D, or
2. Accept defeat and move to another language.

Maybe there is truth behind it. Is D the language for gamers or OS'ers? With Rust entering the Linux and Windows Kernel space... and we have game-specific languages like Odin or Jai... maybe D is not the right choice for these afterall. If the Non-GC guys are that much of a burden, maybe a chat with Walter should happen sooner than later.

Why doesn't the D language have a fully concurrent, pause-free GC? Look at SGCL, experimental tracked pointers library for C++. I've developed this library and can share insights on how such a GC engine works.

On Thursday, 4 April 2024 at 09:32:10 UTC, Sebastian Nibisz wrote:

I believe the reason is that the GC was designed before the multi-core era (or maybe at the very beginning), so STW was less a problem than todays. Then nobody proposed anything new.

On Thursday, 4 April 2024 at 04:01:56 UTC, cc wrote:

I think you're taking the wrong thing from this conversation. You're helping to make the case that the anti-GC crowd is wrong. For me, the problem is that the anti-GC zealots make the following claims:

• The GC gets in the way. It needs to be removed the way Rust removed theirs for performance reasons.
• D isn't suitable as a systems programming language because it has a GC.
• GC should be removed as the default because it leads to bad practice.
• All D programs have to use the GC.

These things appear on Reddit, Hacker News, etc. etc. any time D is discussed, and it has an effect. Convincing someone to use the GC might be right on paper in some cases, but in practice it doesn't work if the other side has a fundamentalist viewpoint that the GC has to be removed entirely. You can see it in the comments on the story: "That's a valid point, but..."

I do think we need to be realistic and realize that the anti-GC crowd has found its love and they've married Rust or they've decide that C++ is a flawed but good enough spouse. That battle is over. D needs to worry about folks that like C (D makes it realistic for them to keep writing the code they like writing) and folks that like GC (the story's probably not as good as it could be).

I'll also add that I use SafeRefCounted a lot, so I'm also avoiding D's GC much of the time rather than forcing the GC into everything I do.

On Thursday, 4 April 2024 at 14:32:58 UTC, bachmeier wrote:

Interesting, could you expand on your wider thinking about doing this?

On Thursday, 4 April 2024 at 14:32:58 UTC, bachmeier wrote:

There is no anti-GC crowd

I will not speak for other people, so i will speak for myself

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:

int[] myarray;
create_array(allocator, myarray, length: 16);


int[int] mymap;
create_map(allocator, mymap)


// or fall back to using GC for casual scripting

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

There is no reason to require the GC to report errors for example, this is beyond stupid

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

The pro-gc people love to enforce the GC everywhere that's not needed, and when people start having issues with it, everyone becomes silent

import core.memory;
import std.stdio;
import std.conv;
import std.datetime.stopwatch;

string[int] stuff;

void main()
{
    for (int i = 0; i < 10_000_000; i++)
        stuff[i] = "hello_" ~ to!(string)(i);

    auto sw = StopWatch(AutoStart.yes);
    auto a = new ubyte[512_000_000];
    writeln(sw.peek.total!"seconds");
}

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

On Thursday, 4 April 2024 at 15:07:23 UTC, Carl Sturtivant wrote:

What I mean is that a lot of memory I use is allocated either by C libraries or by R's garbage collector. SafeRefCounted takes care of all the details for me so I don't have to think about it.