[fpc-pascal] Fwd: What to do to get new users

[Sven Barth]

Michael Van Canneyt via fpc-pascal <fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org>
schrieb am Do., 17. Okt. 2024, 11:40:

>
>
> On Wed, 16 Oct 2024, Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal wrote:
>
> > On Oct 17, 2024 at 12:03:47 AM, Guillermo Martínez Jiménez via
> fpc-pascal <
> > fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Prease DON'T add garbage collector.  IMO it isn't a good idea.  I had
> >> very bad experiences with it. Unless somebody found a new magic
> >> algorithm in the last decade...
> >>
> >
> > I used C# for Unity quite a bit and never had any problems. That’s even
> > with the worst case scenario for game developing that needs real time
> > graphics. Does that power all of .NET too and all those desktop
> > applications? It’s been battle tested many years as far as I can tell.
> >
> > In 2024 you don’t need the performance of manual memory management in UI
> > apps. Garbage collector or anything else will work perfectly well.
>
> I don't write UI apps, only server apps.
> Performance matters there, so a GC is not good.
> We see this at times in our servers, when the GC kicks in; everything just
> stops.
>
> In each case, it is a bad idea to slap this on an existing language:
>
> a GC collected language is a complete paradigm shift from non-GC.
> C# and Java (and probably others) were designed with GC in mind.
> That it works there is therefore not surprising.
>
> By contrast, Pascal is not designed with GC in mind.
> You'd need to redesign the language.
>
> If you do that, you can throw away all existing code if you introduce GC,
> because the two concepts do not merge easily.
>
> Embarcadero tried it in Delphi, and they failed. Not surprisingly,
> they removed again all automatic memory management.
>

Probably something like the std::*_ptr (shared, unique, auto, etc.) from
C++ could be implemented in FPC. Main point missing for a convenient
solution would be a mechanism so that e.g. classes could be accessed as is
from such types (for example default fields)
A proof of concept implementation should be doable without that however.

Regards,
Sven

>
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