On Thursday, 3 December 2015 at 18:36:22 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote:
My experience from Java is that one size never really fits all. Open it up instead. Let the community "plug in" and I am sure D will get a wealth of memory management strategies fast. Not just 1 garbage collector, but N garbage collectors.
One approach might be to allow for memory management with better primitives that simplify the design of manually managed software.
I've been greatly enjoying Jonathan Blow's video blogs on the design of his own language, Jai. It's targeted at game programmers, and as such he's gone to great pains to ensure language primitives remove the friction from manually allocating and deallocating memory, while still providing the full power of such a system.
I wonder what Walter and Andrei think of potentially overhauling those elements in D. Right now all of the manual memory management is basically ripped from C and C++ with no changes, and no insights into how to improve such a system. But I do see why they went that route. Type safety is a top concern.
