Is Phobos's Garbage Collector utterly broken? (Phobos vs Tango)

[Jascha Wetzel]

Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Aug 2007 09:08:16 +0300, Vladimir Panteleev <thecybershadow at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I initially wrote it to try to find a memory leak in Tango's GC (which was actually fixed at some point).
> 
> Turns out it's still there, and it's the old "binary data" issue with pointer-searching GCs, which was fixed in D/Phobos 1.001 by making the GC type-aware. Check out the attached sample programs for a simple example - the Tango version can't know there are no pointers in its GrowBuffer's data, and thus leaks like crazy, while the Phobos version stays at 13MB.

i ran into another issue with the phobos gc. i have constant array 
literals that are used in a constructor to initialize a member. the data 
isn't always used. each instance uses it at most once. the second time 
an instance uses that data, it has been overwritten. the problem 
disappears if i disable the gc.
it looks like the gc frees the memory that holds the constant 
initializer. unfortunately it's really hard to reproduce this problem in 
a small program.