Comment by aapoalas
3 months ago
Hey, thank you for spreading the joy of the borrow checker beyond Rust; awesome stuff, sounds very interesting, challenging, and useful!
One question that came to mind as a single-track-Rust-mind kind of person: in D generally or in your experience specifically, when you find that the borrow checker doesn't work for a data structure, what is the alternative memory management strategy that you choose usually? Is it garbage collection, or manual memory management without a borrow checker?
Cheers!
Personally, I frankly do not need the borrow checker. I have been writing manual memory management code for so long I have simply internalized how to avoid having problems with it. I've been called arrogant for saying this, but it's true.
But I still like the borrow checker style of programming because it makes the code easier to understand.
I find it convenient in the D compiler implementation to use the GC for the AST memory management, as the algorithms that manipulate it are easier if they needn't concern themselves with memory management. A borrow checker approach doesn't fit it comfortably, either.
Many of the data structures persist to the end of the program, as a compiler is a batch program. No memory management strategy is even necessary for those.
Alright, thank you for the answer. Cheers! <3