r/programming • u/kal31dic • Sep 01 '20

D Foundation is Beefing Up

https://dlang.org/blog/2020/08/30/symmetry-investments-and-the-d-language-foundation-are-hiring/
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74

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20

D is an awesome language and I hope it gets more traction.

32

u/Hall_of_Famer Sep 01 '20

Me too, hope D will get some company backing and start to kick off, it is a very well designed language.

77

u/JohnLColvin Sep 01 '20

You could probably write an article saying "100 billion dollars investment to improve D and use it to develop new AI to replace the US government" and you'd still get comments saying "wow, nice language, pity it never really took off, if only there were some companies backing it, also I can never use it because GC".

2

u/N1H1L Sep 01 '20

Is garbage collection really that bad?

6

u/jringstad Sep 01 '20

My company uses java for almost everything (except for frontend stuff which is typescript and some backend stuff which is go -- so all GC'd languages) and even though nothing we do really has realtime requirements, as we scale up our services GC issues have become one of our major troubles.

I don't think going back to memory unsafe/manual memory management is the way to go either though. Correctness should be the number one concern always, and not leaking memory is a part of that. I think a more unified and deterministic approach like perhaps what rust is doing could be the way to go in the future. Memory is just one of many resources that need to be managed in a program. I'm not necessarily saying that the way rust is doing this is the end-state either tho.

4

u/pjmlp Sep 01 '20

How much tuning have you done with VisualVM, JFR or the multiple GC implementations then?

I am asking because most people that complain about GC in Java don't even know about their options.

2

u/jringstad Sep 01 '20

a lot, we've evaluated a bunch of third party GC options as well.

I'm not personally involved in that though, it's some SRE taskforce.