On Sunday, 5 March 2017 at 00:58:44 UTC, Anthony wrote:
[...]
I've learned the basics of D. I read the tutorial book, as I
would call it, and some further tutorials on templates and
other cool things. I just don't feel comfortable investing a
significant effort acquainting myself further with the language
without some guarantee that the feature will be completely
supported eventually.
What do you consider complete support in this context? druntime,
phobos, both? You can definitely write an application where all
heap memory (after the druntime initialization) is allocated (and
deallocated) deterministically, provided you don't use language
builtins that require GC allocations (druntime) or stay away from
other people's code that allocates using the GC (this includes
those parts of phobos). std.experimental.allocator even provides
a nice, generic interface for this (you'll want to use one of the
allocators that aren't GCAllocator, though).
Considering D development is - AFAIK - not primarily driven by
people paid for their work I doubt you'll get a guarantee on any
future development, though.
In a way, I'm picking a tool for my toolbelt, and C++ and D are
competing tools.
If possible, don't pick one, pick both (and to be even more
annoying: also pick some Lisp, Erlang, Haskell, and Rust to get
exposed to many different types of abstraction).
D looks like C++ 2.0, but it's missing a critical function of
it as well. So, I'm conflicted.
If you're referring to deterministic memory management, it's not;
the function is there, it's just up to you to actually use it and
not invoke the GC.
If you're referring to not all of phobos' functions being
compatible with deterministic memory management (as opposed to
stdc++), then yes, that's an ongoing effort.
