A TODO for somebody: Full Reflection Gets You Smarter GC

[Frits van Bommel]

Russ Lewis wrote:
> Sorry, I don't have time to look into this in detail, but I'll post this 
> idea so somebody else can explore it:
> 
> It is possible to have a smarter GC using compile-time reflection.  I 
> haven't had time to explore the members-tuple feature (was it .members, 
> or .membersof?), but if that tuple gives us both the offset into the 
> type *and* the type of the member, then we can construct a GC which 
> knows the types of certain allocations, and knows which elements in 
> those allocations are pointers and which are other data.  At least, it 
> can know this information in allocations where it knows the type.  In 
> cases where it doesn't know the type, it can default to the old scheme 
> (treat all possible pointers as pointers).
> 
> A thought.

I actually had the exact same idea this morning :). I've experimented a 
bit this afternoon trying to get type information using some templates 
but stopped when DMD kept crashing on me :(. [1]
I have yet to find a syntax that'll get DMD to generate a compile-time 
array of structs.

It seems the current tuples implementation is a bit... unstable.


[1]: I'm not sure if someone's already added 'my' crashes to bugzilla, 
the search feature wasn't much help and I didn't have time to reduce 
them to small samples yet. Maybe tomorrow evening.