On Saturday, 18 February 2017 at 20:15:55 UTC, timmyjose wrote:
2. I am more interested in learning D as a pure systems
programming language so that I can develop my own tools (not
looking to develop an OS, just some grep-scale tools to start
off with). In that regard, I have a few concerns about the GC.
My rudimentary knowledge of the D ecosystem tells me that there
is a GC in D, but that can be turned off. Is this correct?
Also, some threads online mention that if we do turn off GC,
some of the core std libraries may not fully work. Is this
presumption also correct?
In this regard, I am curious to know if I would face any issues
(with my intent in mind), or will I do just fine? If you could
share your experiences and domains of use, that would also be
very helpful for me. Secondly, how stable is the language and
how fast is the pace of development on D?
Again, sorry for my ignorance if I have been wrong-footed on
some (or all) points.
I'm using D for small tools for about a year now and I never had
to mess with GC. Most of the tools don't need to work on GBs of
data and performance has always been good enough.
My "biggest" D tool is a custom scriptable code generator based
on lua and sdl (sdlang.org) and even though it's implemented
really badly, it performs good enough to be used in development
(Currently we generate JSON serialization code for delphi with
it).
I also wrote a simple parser for parsing delphi memory leak
reports to show some statistics. Depending on how many leaks you
have, these can get a bit larger, but I always got good enough
performance with D.
Last tool I want to mention is a binary log file parser, which
reads an proprietary log file and converts it into json. And even
this is extremely fast.
So I don't think GC will be a big problem for smaller tools.
