On Tuesday, 30 May 2017 at 10:30:13 UTC, qznc wrote:
Currently, a good answer is to direct people to the "Don't fear the reaper" [0] article, but I feel it does not really address all concerns of people. Concerns like:
That was the introductory post in what I hope will be a long series where many of those concerns *will* be addressed, though I don't have the breadth of knowledge to write them all. My next one is going to cover the basics of @nogc (looking like next week). I hope to have a few guest posters contributing to the series on topics I'm not well-versed in.
* How much of Phobos does not work with @nogc? A good answer would probably be case studies of larger programs/companies. Does Weka use @nogc a lot?
Been reading my TODO list? I have a shortlist of people I plan to ask about a Phobos @nogc post. And I'm planning a series of company profiles where that sort of thing will probably be discussed. I had one company lined up to start before DConf, but it never panned out. But during DConf and since I've gotten some tentative commitments. I intend to kick that off in July.
* How to work around the GC? The reaper article does not mention RefCounted.
A future post will. I expect to have a few posts related to more specialized strategies (Atila's post on automem is in that vein). Currently, I'm planning a post about something I call "Terminator" (which is essentially RefCounted, but calling a `terminate` method rather than the destructor) to introduce the concept, and will talk about RefCounted there. But that's going to come after a post about how the GC interacts with destructors, and that will come after my @nogc post.
* Limitations of @nogc? It does not prevent *another* thread to call the GC, which might then stop the world. We have to mention the trick to create threads which are not tracked by GC. * How good is the D GC? Will it improve in the foreseeable future? Information about the performance of the current GC is quite dated, although I guess not much has changed.
The GC implementation is another thing I hope to have a post about, but it will again require a guest author to write it.
[0] https://dlang.org/blog/2017/03/20/dont-fear-the-reaper/
