On Monday, 1 April 2024 at 20:45:25 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> The discourse around the GC has gotten so ridiculous that I have seriously considered asking Walter to declare that "If you want to create an OS or Video Game, consider a different language."
OS/Games is actually a fairly uncommon use of D, if you look at what the people who aren't whining endlessly about the GC are actually doing with it.
Personally, I blame the OS/Game crowd for single-handedly keeping D out of the web service space for the past decade because, instead of improving the GC to the point that long-running processes are possible, we've built a mountain of (mis)features designed to assuage their demands. I maintain that this was probably the second biggest mistake in D's history.
"We'd have the programming Utopia if only all the goddamn users stopped getting in the way!"
Seriously though, what an asinine opinion. Excluding an entire market, to satisfy your religious opinions on memory management. Nobody has stopped anyone from improving the GC. By all means, please improve the GC. I develop commercial games in D, I have come to avoid the GC much of the time, and I'm pretty sure I haven't spent any of the past 10 years of my workload getting in your way of making the GC the best it could be. I simply haven't been using it. Oh no, someone exposed GC.free and __delete as a hacky temporary stopgap? Gosh, that 30 seconds of work sure did get in the way of a decade of someone else making that thing I want better.
In my opinion, a language that can't handle modern 60+ fps (144-240+ nowadays) gaming or graphical simulations is nothing more than a hobbyist piece of crap and not fit for business. But that's just my opinion... I don't try to force it on anyone else ;) I'm aware other industries exist and we can all graze on our respective farms in peace.
Fortunately, there's numerous ways to get around the problems of stop-the-world GC skips, even working within the GC. It takes a tiny bit of thought, and a document was drafted to suggest these techniques to newcomers, though nobody strained themselves with effort over this since, naturally, the doc wants to sell you his favorite pills. Fair enough. Even so, it is the natural philosophy and developmental style of many to simply avoid the GC. You can either react to this with "different strokes", or you can go full zealot and start holding inquisitions for all the blasphemers.
It actually takes very little effort to please the detmem crowd by just giving them the basic tools they want, compared to trying to sell them on broad spectrum cure-all GC liniment when the seller's approach is "Just use it! Just use it already damnit stop asking questions! No refunds!" and is brazenly ignorant of how much of an issue naive GC use can be for particular situations. D actually HAS gone and given them the tools they need, albeit they don't come in the same nice shiny box as the GC. They're just kind of handed out in plastic baggies. But hey, that's how Ultima sold 50,000 copies before Richard's net worth clapped $1.5B.
In a world where the gold standard of technology is "It Just Works", D's GC... doesn't Just Work. Oh, It DOES Work. It just Works With Effort. And that's a problem you've had 10 years to do something about. What has been done besides paint the church and hand out a lot of fliers?
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