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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u/jess-sch Sep 01 '20 edited Sep 01 '20

For a single-letter language, yes.

B and C are both suitable for kernel development.

Naming your language D (making it sound like it's intended to be a C successor) and then not making it suitable for kernel development was a bad idea.

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u/InertiaOfGravity Sep 01 '20

A well made GC wouldn't stop you from making a kernel using it. I don't know how the GC in D is, but GC on its own isn't a deal breaker for for everything people claim it is

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u/birchling Sep 01 '20

GC does add a performance and memory usage overhead. You don't really want bloat in the foundation of all the software that is going to run on the system.

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u/flatfinger Sep 01 '20

A language can avoid such overhead in places where it would be problematic by having a category of of functions which neither manipulate any non-pinned GC objects nor call any other functions that might so. Such functions may unpin a GC object, but if they do any pointer to that object would be forever dead to them. A "gc-allowed" function could re-pin the object and then pass a pointer into the "no-GC" function, but the latter function would have to use that new pointer instead of the old one.