GC, the simple solution

[Sean Kelly]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Jeff Parsons wrote:
>> My _only_ significant beef with D so far as been the unbound time for 
>> a garbage collection; therefore, if an incremental garbage collector 
>> built into D could guarantee me a set maximum time would be taken for 
>> each garbage collection (which I would manually induce as often as 
>> possible) then unless the efficiency hit is TERRIBLE I would be all 
>> over it.
> 
> If you're looking for a *guarantee*, then you cannot even use malloc(). 
> Malloc has unbounded time, and is not predictable.

For what it's worth, I have read papers describing hard real-time 
incremental garbage collectors, but I haven't yet seen one available 
outside research circles.  I'd like to give one a shot at some point, 
but I've far too many other distractions to know when that will be.

If anyone is interested however, some of the papers are available here:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/oops/papers.html

See papers 11 and 14.

> The approach most real time programmers use to deal with this is to 
> preallocate all needed data before entering the real time section, and 
> the real time section does no malloc's or free's.

This is certainly the easiest and probably the safest method.


Sean