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by sfpotter 245 days ago
> This sounds like an admission that the community is fractured, except with a weirdly judgemental tone towards those who use D without a GC?

That's not what I'm saying, and who cares if it's fractured or not? Why should that influence your decision making?

There are people who complain loudly about the GC, and then there are lots of other people who do not complain loudly and also use D in many different interesting ways. Some use the GC, some don't. People get hyper fixated on the GC, but it isn't the only thing going on in the language.
1 comments
mort96 245 days ago
> who cares if it's fractured or not? Why should that influence your decision making?

Because, if I want to write code in D without the GC, it impacts me negatively if I can't use most of the libraries created by the community.

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sfpotter 245 days ago
What domain are you working in? It's hard to be able to say anything specific that might help you if you can't explain a little more clearly what you're working on.

I will say there are a larger and larger number of no-GC libraries. Phobos is getting an overhaul which is going to seriously reduce the amount that the GC is used.

It is probably also worth reflecting for a moment why the GC is causing problems for you. If you're doing something where you need some hard-ish realtime guarantee, bear in mind that the GC only collects when you allocate.

It's also possible to roll your own D runtime. I believe people have done things like replace the GC with allocators. The interface to the GC is not unduly complicated. It may be possible to come up with a creative solution to your problem.

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mort96 245 days ago
I work in many domains, some where a GC is totally no problem, and some where I'd rather not have a GC (such as microcontrollers, games, the occasional kernel code, software running on embedded Linux devices with very limited memory).

I'm happy with C++ and Rust for those tasks. For other tasks where I want a GC, I'm perfectly happy with some combination of Go, Python and Typescript. I'm realistically never going to look into D.

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sfpotter 245 days ago
I'm glad you've found a nice stack that you like working with! D has been used for every domain mentioned. Whether or not you look into D in the future is no business of mine.
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