Question about garbage collector

[qznc]

On Wednesday, 28 August 2013 at 21:28:11 UTC, bioinfornatics 
wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> yesterday i read an article into a french linux journal that in 
> some years garbage collector will disapear.
>
> Why ? he explain in very very short as:
> --------------------------
> - Moore's law will be not anymore true
> so only memory will continue to increase ( static and volatil )
> - Garbage Collector are not efficient in big memory for some 
> technical reason
> - Data to manage will continue to grow big data ant full memory 
> stategy will the rule
>
> So Develloper will move to a language where they are no garbage 
> collector.
> --------------------------
>
> In bioinformatic we work with big data or full memory stategy 
> often and that will not stop. So what think D garbage 
> cllector's dev about this ?

Yes, I got this gist from hardware researchers repeatedly. Buzz 
phrases like "all computing is low power computing now" get 
thrown around. You can google "dark silicon" for more details.

However, your summary (or the article) is not quite correct. 
Garbage collection is not efficient in little-memory scenarios 
(embedded systems). Good, efficient garbage collection often 
requires a few times as much memory as manual memory management. 
This means if your application needs lots of RAM, you might be 
able tackle bigger tasks, if you get rid of the garbage collector.

Also, be careful about the problem domain. There will be enough 
domains left in some years, where garbage collection is the 
better tradeoff. Just think about all the domains where 
Python,Ruby,etc are popular now. The interesting field is mobile, 
though. Android's Dalvik and Web Apps use garbage collection. iOS 
switched to compiler-supported reference counting a few years 
ago. Mobile means saving battery is important, so efficiency is 
important. However, battery life is not the biggest factor for 
consumers.