On 9 January 2014 13:08, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

On 1/8/2014 12:23 PM, Benjamin Thaut wrote:

Additionaly programming with a GC often leads to a lot more allocations,

I believe that this is incorrect. Using GC leads to fewer allocations, because you do not have to make extra copies just so it's clear who owns the allocations.

You're making a keen assumption here that C programmers use STL. And no sane programmer that I've ever worked with uses STL precisely for this reason :P

Sadly, being conscious of eliminating unnecessary copies in C/C++ takes a lot of work (see: time and money), so there is definitely value in factoring that problem away, but the existing GC is broken. Until it doesn't leak, stop the world, and/or can run incrementally, it remains no good for realtime usage.

There were 2 presentations on improved GC's last year, why do we still have the lamest GC imaginable? I'm still yet to hear any proposal on how this situation will ever significantly improve...

*cough* ARC...

For example, if you've got an array of char* pointers, in D some can be GC allocated, some can be malloc'd, some can be slices, some can be pointers to string literals. In C/C++, the array has to decide on an ownership policy, and all elements must conform.

This means extra copies.