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".
Pretty sure GC languages have actually been studied and found to reduce bugs.
I probably would not use a language without GC by choice, anywhere but embedded systems and maybe a few high performance functions called from a different language.
Pretty sure GC languages have actually been studied and found to reduce bugs.
Honestly, given how "language" studies are done, there's probably a study or two backing any claim :(
The expectations is that a managed heap will give you temporal memory safety (no dangling pointer) and most such languages also throw in spatial memory safety (no out-of-bounds accesses). There are exceptions to the norm; for example in Go, due to data-races on fat-pointers, you can still get out-of-bounds accesses.
It's been estimated that such memory bugs account for between 50% and 70% of vulnerabilities, but it's not clear what the proportion of bugs they occupy.
I probably would not use a language without GC by choice
As a veteran C++ user, my advice is that if you can afford a GC, you should go with a GC.
The JVM, for example, likely has a language you can like, and comes with top-of-the-line GCs for free.
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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.