No, this expierence is not only based of this. I observed multiple discussions on the newsgroup, where turning off the GC would speed up the program by factor 3. The most recent one was
The GC doesn't even show up in the profiler for this/my use case. The one optimisation I did to avoid allocations increased performance by all of 5%. It really depends on the use case, and I don't think assuming a factor of 3 is advisable.
That is another common argument of pro GC people I have never seen in partice yet. Meaning, I never seen a case where freeing a tree of objects would cause a significant enough slowdown. I however saw lots of cases where a garbage collection caused a significant slowdown.
Well, if I wasn't aware of allocation I wouldn't have done the optimisation mentioned above, so it's a good point.
As far as slowdown happening with manual memory management, in certain cases cleaning up reference counted smart pointers can cause as much of a slowdown as a GC kicking in. This isn't my opinion though, there are data to that effect. Again, it depends on the use case.
Still it only solves half the problem.
Maybe in Java. In D at least we have struct destructors for other resources.
It was never intended to. I just wanted to make the point, that even if you want, you can't avoid C++.
A fair point. I think what we're saying is not that we won't ever write C++ again, but that we won't write it again if given the choice and if another language (not necessarily D) is also a good fit.
I'd be surprised if I wasn't still writing / refactoring / debugging C++ code a few decades for now. I don't want to write C again ever, but I know I'll have to.
I fully agree here. Still when choosing a programming language you also have to pick one that all programmers on the team can and want to use. I fear that the D metaprogramming capabilities will scare of quite a few programmers because it seems to complicated to them. (Its really the same with C++ metaprogramming. Its syntactically ugly and verbose, but gets the job done, and is not so complicated if you are familiar with the most important concepts).
I disagree wholeheartedly. It's a _lot_ more complicated in C++. D can also do more than C++, with far saner syntax.