GC (Virtually Zero-Overhead Object Management)

[Craig Black]

"Sean Kelly" <sean at f4.ca> wrote in message 
news:ekiu16$1ndk$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
> zz wrote:
>> While having a discussion about GC's with a friend, he brought up this 
>> link which I found quite interesting (at the first reading) and I thought 
>> others would also find it interesting.
>>
>> I'm still very skeptical of the claims.
>
> Don't be.  Chris Thomasson may talk a bit big at times, but he has a solid 
> grasp of the problems involved and VZOOM has gotten a lot of attention 
> lately from some pretty respectable sources (I think it just won some kind 
> of award in a contest sponsored by Sun or some such).  I haven't given 
> VZOOM a very close look myself, but what I've heard Chris say about it 
> makes me believe that it probably lives up to his claims. What makes VZOOM 
> so fast, from what I've heard, is that it almost completely avoids the use 
> of memory synchronization instructions through the use of some clever 
> tricks, along the lines of RCU + SMR.  Last I heard Chris was working on a 
> lock-free GC which sounded fairly promising, though it was smart-pointer 
> based and therefore not really suitable for D.

Why not?  If someone has discovered a good GC solution via smart pointers 
and reference counting, why couldn't D leverage this new technology somehow? 
I'm not talking about dumping our current GC for another, but rather 
providing options.  This could probably be done using a mixin that provides 
an overloaded new and delete. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

I believe that one huge criticism of reference counting was that it was slow 
for multi-threading.  Well, if there is a lock-free algorithm becomes 
available, then that argument can no longer be used.

-Craig