On Friday, 21 May 2021 at 07:07:19 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

What do you propose that D should do?

I am not in a position to do anything more than propose ideas that can be developed into something that both satisfies the high level D programmers and the low level programmers and try to build some common ground. Building common ground takes time and repeated communication. You need to consider many proposals and evolve them to get to a good solution.

Nim seems to have considered and tested several options before landing on ARC, that is the right approach. Don't settle for anything before you have explored the options.

In my opinion a task based GC + shared RC should satisfy the needs of both groups and most single threaded code would not need many changes.

Do like those projects, the powers at the steering wheel should stick with the original design and push it no matter what, instead of switching direction every couple of years and never finishing it.

Do like those projects, the powers at the steering wheel should stick with the original design and push it no matter what, instead of switching direction every couple of years and never finishing it.

popularity. For high level scripting languages, there are plenty of alternatives.

On Friday, 21 May 2021 at 09:02:32 UTC, IGotD- wrote:

Exactly, to do high level well you are also better off using a JIT as it opens for new and interesting language smantics (and performance).

Do like those projects, the powers at the steering wheel should stick with the original design and push it no matter what, instead of switching direction every couple of years and never finishing it.

On Friday, 21 May 2021 at 08:43:44 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

There is no future for a glorified scripting language, there are too many powerful alternatives for scripting. That is effectively proposing long tail decay as a strategy.

D has to support those that use D for scriptlike programming today, but there is no future in it, if that is all it aspires to do well.

On Friday, 21 May 2021 at 08:43:44 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:

The reason we want to move away from tracing GC is because of this, to quote Araq in this thread.

https://forum.dlang.org/post/fttikqwuygkdmpbfocdh@forum.dlang.org

But Nim actually bets on RC because it's much more amenable to manual optimizations and because it works well with custom memory management, making it a good fit for "systems programming".

If D wants be a viable option in embedded and systems programming, it has to move away from the tracing GC it has today. This is one of the big reasons D doesn't gain popularity. For high level scripting languages, there are plenty of alternatives.

I'm glad D did not follow that literally. Remember, templates are the result of breaking that rule and changing direction early in D history.

It's interesting to see how D would turn out without templates however. Template metaprogramming comes with a cost, such as forever dooming yourself to subpar IDE experience.