2011/12/11 Paulo Pinto <pj...@progtools.org> > Am 10.12.2011 21:35, schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu: > >> On 12/10/11 2:22 PM, maarten van damme wrote: >> >>> Just for fun I >>> wanted to create a program as little as possible, compiled without >>> garbage collector/phobos/... and it turned out that compiling without >>> garbage collector is pretty much impossible (memory leaks all around the >>> place in druntime). dynamic linking for the d standard library would be >>> a great new option for a dmd release in the future :). >>> >> >> Using D without GC is an interesting direction, and dynamic linking >> should be available relatively soon. >> >> >> Andrei >> > > As a long time beliver in systems programming languages with GC support > (Modula-3, Oberon, Sing#, ...), I think allowing this in D is the wrong > direction. > > Sure provinding APIs to control GC behavior makes sense, but not turn it > off, we already have enough languages to do systems programming without GC. >
I was only trying it "for the fun of it", not to be used seriously. D should always have it's GC support built-in and have some functions to control it's behaviour (core.memory). But I think that D, beeing a systems programming language, should also be able to be used without GC. I don't mean phobos to be writtin without a GC in mind but druntime should be compilable with something like a -nogc flag that make it usable without GC. There are a lot of users out there who think that a GC produces terribly slow programs, big hangs while collecting,... (thank java for that. Right now the java GC has been improved and it's extremely good but the memory stays :p) Letting them know that D can be run without GC can be a good point. If they don't like it, they can turn it off.