Transitioning to a type aware Garbage Collector

Walter Bright newshound at digitalmars.com
Tue Jan 23 14:38:05 PST 2007


Frits van Bommel wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> 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?
>>
>> No.
> 
> So what exactly *does* it mean?
> Is it, as Pragma put it, a "bool containsPointers" per block?
> Or is it mostly-precise?
> 
> "Not exact/precise" still leaves a pretty big range...

All it means is that a bit gets set per block meaning if it might 
contain pointers or does not contain pointers. In the future, it might 
give a list of which offsets contain pointers.

> And if it's just a bool, what was the reasoning behind this decision?
> Ease of implementation? The overhead of the metadata needed to get to 
> mostly-precise? All of the above?

It's a fairly significant improvement for a small change.



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