On Monday, 6 March 2017 at 05:50:01 UTC, Rico Decho wrote:
It's actually rather rare to *need* to avoid the GC -- only
niche applications need that, like if you're writing a game
engine that has to avoid stop-the-world pauses (which can be
easily worked around, btw), or real-time medical applications
where if it stops for 10ms somebody dies. 90% of real world
programs out there work just fine with the GC.
Actually it's my case. I'd LOVE to use D for game development
for instance, but I won't take the risk of having the GC pause
the game when I don't want to, even for just an unknown amount
of milliseconds, and even if I know that anyway I'll try to
limit dynamic allocations by using caches etc.
If this isn't a perfect example of D's marketing problem I don't
know what is. Someone who likes D and takes the time to write on
the forum yet thinks the GC will randomly run no matter what.
To make it abundantly clear: I'm not bashing on you in the
slightest, Rico Decho. I'm just pointing out that there's a clear
problem here in that we can't expect to convert e.g. C++ game
developers who have never written a line of D before if we
haven't even managed to educate the community yet.
Unfortunately, I have no ideas on how to remedy the situation. I
also don't know how to get people to stop believing that C is
magically fast either, which I think is a similar perception
problem.
Atila
