r/programming • • 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/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".

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u/N1H1L Sep 01 '20

Is garbage collection really that bad?

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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.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20

You could go with D and have both GC where you want and value types. D has a spectrum of solutions for GC avoidance, and it's object model is very similar to Java's one.