Current State of the GC?

[rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On 11/10/2016 10:12 AM, Martin Lundgren wrote:
> I've been reading up a bit on the D garbage collector. Seen mostly
> negative things about it. I've also seen a lot of proposals and what
> not, but not much about the current state of things.
>
> The latest page I can find about it is 2015H1. It mentions improving the
> GC and making libraries less reliant on it. However, I can't find *any*
> information about what GC improvements have been made. No up to date
> performance comparisons, etc.
>
> So what's been happening in memory management land lately? Bad GC seems
> like one of the Dlangs weak points, so showing improvements here could
> definitely bring more people in.

Well I can't say what has happened since that half way document.
Most of the work that goes on is minor tweaks and improvements that 
pretty much nobody outside of druntime knows about and that is quite all 
right.

If you want to actually see all these things going on check out Github[0].

Anyway, most of the time the GC isn't a problem, contrary to popular 
belief. As long as you do tricks like reusing memory it will never fire 
and more importantly you won't be hit with memory allocation costs. So 
basically a double win for you in terms of speed.

When dealing with multi threading you probably want to disable the GC 
collection and have predefined points so it can collect safely with no 
performance hits.

In reality, except for some cycle counting points, you won't need a 
million dollar GC and even then they tend to fail at those sort of jobs.

[0] 
https://github.com/dlang/druntime/tree/2db828bd4f21807254b770b3ec304f14596a9805/src/gc