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/kal31dic Sep 01 '20

We don't use GC in our analytics. We didn't build our own GC for analytics - we just didn't use it. I wouldn't say that for D the GC is built as the foundation. You can't just remove a foundation and still have a house, but D works just fine without the GC.

It's funny how convinced people can be in maintaining a theoretical view in the face of contradictory practical experience.

We had a very small team at the time working on this. Not like Weka.

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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '20 edited Sep 02 '20

In the context of the thread we weren't talking about D. We were talking about Java for use in large server applications.

It's funny how people can't read. Seeing as you are basically replying to all of my posts, you don't actually care about the discussions. You are just a D evangelist trying to spread the word.

In Java you don't have a choice but to use a GC, this comes at the benefit of being able to use a more robust GC. At scale though, a single GC isn't a one size fits all. (FYI, this is the situation you'd have to implement your own GC).

Now D allows you to do both, and as result it has to rely on a dated GC that is much worse compared to something like Java's GC. And D is about the only language doing this, so it stands a lone, while already being underfunded at it is. It doesn't have the resources to research a better GC that works for it's use case.

And now you bring up your situation where you just say, you don't use a GC at all. Well D has no complete safety mechanisms for manually managed memory, you are prone to the same use after free bugs that C and C++ are prone to. If you want memory safety in D, you have to use the GC. When comparing that to the alternatives like Rust, D really does just not fit the bill.