Transitioning to a type aware Garbage Collector

[Sean Kelly]

Paul Findlay wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> To improve GC performance, we need to transition to a GC that is aware 
>> of the types of what it is allocating.
> Does this mean the D garbage collector will be an exact (or precise) 
> garbage collector?

If a block contains pointers then the entire block will still be scanned 
instead of just the pointers in that block, so It will still be a 
conservative collector but with fewer false positives.  I think this 
could be changed so that just the pointers were scanned, but there would 
likely be a noticeable performance hit for doing so.  If false positives 
are still a concern (and I'm not convinced they will be), a better 
approach may be to pursue a different GC design such as the CBGC 
mentioned yesterday.


Sean