Memory management dilemma

[Jeff Parsons]

Rémy Mouëza wrote:
> In article <e5c89d$6ki$2 at digitaldaemon.com>, Jeff Parsons says...
>> I need to manage memory explicitly since it seems to be impossible to 
>> guarantee long-term smooth operation when using only garbage collection. 
>> I don't see introducing artificial pauses into gameplay during which 
>> garbage is collected, or allowing the game to bloat horribly over time 
>> as solutions.
> 
> I discussed about similar concerns with a friend of mine: is a C programmer and
> think nothing is better than C. He discovered that D is binary compatible with C
> and we're planning to collaborate on a game engine. Memory management was (and
> might still be) the first problem we needed to solve. 
> 
>> [*] I can see a LOT of manual "delete whatever" popping up if I'm 
>> dealing with expressions that involve a lot of vector or matrix math. Is 
>> there a way to avoid this (having locally created objects automatically 
>> destroyed when they go out of scope)?
> 
> Yes, there is a way: auto variable.
> #   Result aFunction ()
> #   {
> #       auto Matrix matrix = new Matrix ;
> #       // ... work with your matrix
> #       return result ;
> #   }
> #   // getting out of scope deletes 
> #   // the auto allocated matrix.
> 
> You can also make an auto class : 
> auto class Matrix { ... }
> All the instances of this class will be deleted when getting out of scope.
> There are restriction in the use of auto variable : you can't return an auto
> variable and... I've forgotten, they're due to the temporary nature of such
> instances. See:
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/declaration.html#AutoDeclaration
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/class.html#deallocators, the section after
> deallocators deals with auto classes.
> 
> There is also the scope ( exit ) {} statement that defer the execution of its
> instructions at the exit of the current scope.
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/statement.html#scope
> Less convenient than the auto variable.
> 
>> Is there a nice neat way to handle this in D or should I expect a lot of 
>> pain when not using the garbage collector? And if I do go down this 
>> path, how can I tell if I -am- leaking memory?
> People says lot of good things about Valgrind, a software that trace your memory
> allocations. I don't know if it works for D. 



Thanks for the advice.

I'll definitely look into Valgrind, and make use of auto where appropriate.