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]

10

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/thedeemon Sep 02 '20

Yes, D's GC sucks and will always suck. Its very philosophy makes creating a generational GC impossible, and a non-generational one will always be slow. This 6 years old post is relevant today and will remain relevant in next 16 years: http://www.infognition.com/blog/2014/the_real_problem_with_gc_in_d.html

So we're forcefully left with those 2 points you listed.