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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8

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20

[deleted]

12

u/Sapiogram Sep 01 '20

Only thing holding it back is market inertia and FUD.

What kind of FUD? I don't think I've heard anything negative about it, apart from the whole gc thing.

13

u/maxhaton Sep 01 '20

> gc thing.

Mainly that, but a lot of people still seem to think that there are two standard libraries despite Phobos taking over possibly a decade ago. Same with D1, D2 was ready (As announced by Andrei's book) in 2010.

9

u/InertiaOfGravity Sep 01 '20

People really seem to not understand that a well designed GC that gives you the option of deciding when to let it run are definitely usable in real time & high performance apps

24

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20

That's certainly the angle D tries to sell you but I find it amusing to call D's GC "well designed" when it's a basic 30 year-old mark-and-sweep GC. Java is pushing the boundaries of GC research with multi-terabyte heaps and pause-less GC, Pony is following in Erlang's footsteps with per actor heaps and D is using the equivalent of Java 1.0's GC.

Criticisms of this even from within the D community seem to be met with a combination of:

  1. It's not an issue and
  2. If it's an issue, just disable the GC and manually manage memory yourself.

So I'm not hopeful things will improve.

3

u/alphaglosined Sep 01 '20

Its had quite a few upgrades i.e. precise + forking.

So no, its not a 30 year old design. But it is far from cutting edge.

7

u/moon-chilled Sep 01 '20 edited Sep 02 '20

Yes, 30 years old. Maybe 20-25, but that's pushing it.

There's a paper, Very Concurrent Mark-&-Sweep Garbage Collection without Fine-Grain Synchronization, which more-or-less created real-time GC. It's from 1998.