I'm looking for a modestly mature language to be a C++ replacement for my hobby needs. D seems to be a good one as it ticks all the boxes of C++ while fixing most (all?) of its flaws. However, what confuses me is the fact that D has a garbage collector. My necessary requirement is that the runtime should not include any such thing. And D does have some sort of @nogc switch. My question is, how usable is the scenario of GC-free programs in reality? Does the switch apply globally, so that the compiled binary is free from GC code? How many essential libraries can work without GC? Is it better for me to look elsewhere if I don't want GC?

Thanks for your clarifications!

On Friday, 15 July 2022 at 09:27:51 UTC, LinguisticMystic wrote:

What kind of software do you want to write

On Friday, 15 July 2022 at 09:31:14 UTC, max haughton wrote:

Video games, number crunching. Stuff C++ is usually used for.

On Friday, 15 July 2022 at 09:40:05 UTC, LinguisticMystic wrote:

For number crunching the GC is not going to get in your way (i.e. more than the actual mathematics) unless you write extremely unfortunate code (this is true of any memory allocator).

On Friday, 15 July 2022 at 09:27:51 UTC, LinguisticMystic wrote:

I make GC free programs but not out of choice.

The GC is very rarely the cause of bad performance; there is nothing preventing you from optimizing, because D is native and a system language. SO it's not like a Javascript situation, where creating garbage can be unavoidable.

On the contrary, if you can use a GC you will be more productive for the non-critical parts, and creating a good program in the first place. Gaining valuable time to optimize bottlenecks.

An enormous majority of system software can be written with a GC somewhere.

On Friday, 15 July 2022 at 09:40:05 UTC, LinguisticMystic wrote:

Depends on what kind of video games you are thinking of. A strategy game or a basic RPG MUD would be no problem, even with the GC. You can bind to non-templated C++, so you could use a flexible C/C++ renderer like Skia running on a non-gc thread.

If you want to create a first person shooter game then you should pick the framework(s) first, and language second. Creating a quality game-engine for that from scratch takes a massive investment given hardware differences etc, so the language-choice becomes secondary.

That said, everything in C++ is RAII-based so it is hard to beat in terms of language features for that type of programming, despite C++ being one of the most time consuming languages around. C++ is not really a hobby language…

Anyway, you don't have to stick to one language. You can mix.

On Friday, 15 July 2022 at 11:18:15 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

But you shouldn't mix as debugging and the tooling situation in general across languages is terrible. At least when "mixing" implies some sort of scripting language with its own interpreter loop.

On Friday, 15 July 2022 at 09:27:51 UTC, LinguisticMystic wrote:

I don't have an answer to your main question, because I mostly just use the GC (including for number crunching) and my life is good.

However, I want to caution that you need to view D as an alternative to C++, not an iteration. I have on many occasions seen C++ users get upset because D does not always operate the way they're used to C++ operating. It's a different language.

Bjarne Stroustrup has, for a very long time, boasted that you can use garbage collection with C++. That has clearly not prevented you from using C++. The fact that D has a garbage collector does not mean anything; just don't use it. You'll lose some parts of the standard library.

On Friday, 15 July 2022 at 11:48:31 UTC, Araq wrote:

Recommended reading it： https://dlang.org/blog/the-gc-series/