As just one anecdote, the mere presence of a GC made me stop looking at D more or less immediately. In terms of positioning, I think D would be better served focusing on a vertical.
A lot of people say that, but that's the tip of an iceberg of 500 items that will prevent someone that doesn't want GC from using it. In other words, nobody ever used a language only because it didn't have a GC.
But if we're being reasonable, then I can say me and my company mostly still use C++ because it doesn't have a GC. It's an otherwise horrible language and I'd love to get off it. For a new project making an order matching system for a financial exchange, we are experimenting with Rust as an alternative and it's looking very promising. I want to see a bit more how the async situation plays out because that aspect of the language has me concerned but overall it's a really clean and principled language.
At any rate, the point is that a GC in and of itself is a major deciding factor about whether a language is used or not for many production grade systems.
I wasn't being extreme. I was making a statement based on year after year seeing people make the same claim. After the GC is gone, then it's the legacy C++ code, the lack of documentation, the lack of developers experienced with C++, the tooling, various language issues, and on and on.
The thing is, you can already disable the GC and slap @nogc on your program and you don't have a GC. Or compile with the -betterC flag and you don't have a GC. It's not like D requires using the GC. When you say that, the reply is "Yes, but..." followed by issues using D as @nogc.
> we are experimenting with Rust as an alternative and it's looking very promising. I want to see a bit more how the async situation plays out because that aspect of the language has me concerned but overall it's a really clean and principled language.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The GC is only one of many reasons you're not using D and probably never will. And that's okay, because if you remove the GC, someone like me will never look twice at the language.
All the rest of your points in your follow up post are very specific to D and yes, those other points are all legitimate reasons people don't use D, regardless of its GC. It's simply that your original claim about language preference on the basis of GC was not specific to D and it's certainly false.
There are some English issues with your post (using a language because it doesn't have a GC is pretty different from quitting a language because it has a GC) so I'm going to let this discussion die.
I don't know what that means
That's a shame, because it is extremely easy to write GC-free code in D. One very important fact is that if you don't allocate using the GC (using "new", appending to a slice, etc.), *the GC will never run*. D provides you a ton of tools to make sure that you're not doing GC allocations, and if you are, where in your code they are happening (@nogc, -vgc and even -betterC).