On Wednesday, 25 July 2018 at 17:23:40 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote:
But don't be too optimistic about BetterC...
I'm too old to get optimistic about these things. In the very best case, D has quite an uphill battle for market share. Any non mainstream language does. If I were a betting man, I'd bet on Rust.
Honestly, considering D's leadership current priorities, I don't see how it could become soon a true C++ or Go competitor, even with the half-baked BetterC initiative...
There are a few ways I can see, and doubtless others can see different ones. Here's one: use Mir and BetterC to write a TensorFlow competitor for use in developing and deploying ML models. I'm sure you can shoot holes in that idea, but you get the point. Try lots of things and see what works, and keep doing more of those things. Worked for Python.
For instance, I've suggested they consider using reference counting as an alternative default memory management scheme, and add it to the lists of scolarship and crowdsourced project, and of course they have added all the other suggestion, but not this one. What a surprise ;)
I'm pretty sure D leadership is pursuing such things. In fact, https://wiki.dlang.org/Vision/2018H1 rather prominently mentions it.
Despite this is probably one of the most used allocation management scheme in typical C++ development, as this drastically reduces the risks of memory leaks and dangling pointers...
Anyway, meanwhile D remains a fantastic strongly-typed scripting language for file processing and data analysis, and its recent adoption at Netflix has once again clearly proved it...
For this and similar uses, tracing GC is fine, better in fact than the alternatives. I'm only making noise about betterC for the cases where C++ dominates and tracing GC is a showstopper.
In an alternative timeline, DasBtterC would have been released before D with GC, and the main libraries would have been nogc, and maybe there'd be a split between raw pointers and traced refs (like Nim and Modula-3) and then maybe there'd have been no strong desire for Rust since D could have filled that niche.
