On Thursday, 17 July 2014 at 13:29:18 UTC, John wrote:
If D came without GC, it would have replaced C++ a long time ago!
That's overly optimistic I think, but I believe that the adoption rate would have been far greater for a D without GC, or perhaps with a more GC friendly design, as the GC comes up first or close in every D discussion with prospective adopters.
However, it's way too late to change that now. IMO, the way forward involves removing all or most hidden allocations from the D libraries, making programming sans GC easier (@nogc everywhere, a compiler switch, documentation for how to work around the lack of GC, etc.) and a much better, precise GC as part of the D release. Any spec changes necessary to support precision should be in a fast path.
