Things that keep D from evolving?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Saturday, 6 February 2016 at 22:41:28 UTC, cy wrote:
> On Saturday, 6 February 2016 at 10:29:32 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
> Grøstad wrote:
>> This prevents fast GC: Pointers.
>
> Would it be possible to write a fast garbage collector that 
> just didn't track any pointers? Just offer a head's up that if 
> you use "this collector" and pointers on collectable data, 
> you're gonna have a bad time? How limited would you be if you 
> couldn't use pointers in your code? Do all D references count 
> as pointers, or is it only the T* types?

Yes, all references to gc allocated memory. "fast" is perhaps the 
wrong word, Go has a concurrent collector with low latency 
pauses, but requires slower code for mutating pointers since 
another thread is collwcting garbage at the same time.

Things that could speed up collection:
- drop destructors so you don't track dead objects
- require pointers to beginning of gc object and make them a 
special type, so you scan less
- use local heaps and local collection per fiber
- change layout so pointers end up on the same cachelines