On Monday, 23 February 2015 at 05:54:06 UTC, Manu wrote:
On 23 February 2015 at 14:11, Andrei Alexandrescu via
Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
On 2/22/15 5:57 PM, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
I can easily visualise a way forward with RC.
Then do it. Frankly it seems to me you're doing anything you
possibly can to
talk yourself out of doing work.
Excellent technique to immediately invalidate everything
someone says.
Thanks for that.
You dismissed absolutely everything I said, and then imply that
I have
no right to comment unless I do it myself.
It's got nothing to do with doing work. ARC (or something like
it) is
almost religiously opposed. We can't even have a reasonable
conversation about it, or really explore it's implications
before
someone (that ideally know's what they're doing) thinks about
writing
code. There's no room for progress in this environment.
What do you want me to do? I use manual RC throughout my code,
but the
experience in D today is identical to C++. I can confirm that
it's
equally terrible to any C++ implementation I've used. We have
no tools
to improve on it.
And whatever, if it's the same as C++, I can live with it. I've
had
that my whole career (although it's sad, because we could do
much
better).
The problem, as always, is implicit allocations, and
allocations from
3rd party libraries. While the default allocator remains
incompatible
with workloads I care about, that isolates us from virtually
every
library that's not explicitly written to care about my use
cases.
That's the situation in C++ forever. We're familiar with it,
and it's
shit. I have long hoped we would move beyond that situation in D
(truly the #1 fantasy I had when I first dove in to D 6 years
back),
but it's a massive up-hill battle to even gain mindshare,
regardless
of actual implementation. There's no shared vision on this
matter, the
word is basically "GC is great, everyone loves it, use an RC
lib".
How long do we wait for someone to invent a fantastical GC that
solves
our problems and works in D? I think it's practically agreed
that no
known design can work, but nobody wants to bite the bullet and
accept
the fact.
We need to admit we have an impassable problem, and then maybe
we can
consider alternatives openly. Obviously, it would be
disruptive, but
it might actually work... which is better than where we seem to
be
heading (with a velocity of zero).
The fact is, people who are capable of approaching this problem
in
terms of actual code will never even attempt it until there's
resounding consensus that it's worth exploring.
Personally I think what matters is getting D's situation
regarding memory management sorted out, regardless out it will
look like in the end.
If I am a bit too quick jumping the gun about GC, is that I have
embraced GC languages in my line of work, so I tend to be aware
that not all GCs are made alike and some like the ones from e.g.
Aonix are good enough for real time situations, the ones someone
dies if the GC runs on the wrong moment.
Maybe such GC quality is impossible to achieve in D, I don't know.
What I can say is that I cannot use D on my type of work and
keeping up with everything that happens on the JVM, .NET and
mobile space already keeps me busy enough.
