How to create nogc code?

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Monday, July 11, 2016 01:16:11 Adam Sansier via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> Thanks. I'd rather prematurely optimize out the gc then have to
> go back and get it to work. It's not hard to write non-gc code,
> it's been done for ages.  But having some compiler help makes
> things nice. It seems there is more of a phobia of writing non-gc
> code than the phobia of the gc.

It's more a case that you're just making life harder for yourself if you
avoid the GC. Some programs (like AAA games) are going to need to avoid the
GC, but your average program is going to be just fine using the GC -
especially if you use idiomatic D and favor structs over classes and use
ranges rather than allocating a bunch of stuff on the heap like you'd do in
Java, or even often in C++. So, most folks who are trying to avoid the GC
are causing themselves pain by doing so without actually needing to. It's
perfectly possible to do avoid the GC in D, and some programs will need to,
but most won't, and avoiding the GC is always more of a pain than just using
it.

My advice would that unless you're doing something where you know that a
stop the world GC will be unacceptable, that you just use the GC and not
worry about it until profiling shows you that you need to do something
differently. And even then, it's often the case that you just need to alter
a small portion of your program so that the GC doesn't run during that piece
of the code, or you make a critical thread be non-GC so that it doesn't get
stopped during a collection cycle. Folks have made very performance-critical
programs work that way, and it's a lot more pleasant than trying to avoid
the GC everywhere.

I don't know what you're doing, so I don't know whether you should be trying
to avoid the GC or not. You're obviously the one who's going to have to
judge that. I'm just pointing out that odds are that you don't need to avoid
it and that you're just making life harder for yourself if you do. But what
you do is obviously completely up to you.

- Jonathan M Davis