Garbage collector memory leak "feature"?

[0ffh]

David Brown wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 05:29:01PM +0200, 0ffh wrote:
>> No, only "conservative" gcs. There are also "exact" gc, but they have one
>> big drawback: No void* type at all is possible!
>> So either you want them, then you must use a conservative gc, or you 
>> don't then you can have an exact gc.
>> D wants void*, so there is just no way round.
> You can have limited void*, if you retain the types in the blocks that are
> allocated.  What you can't do is use casts to view things of one type as a
> different type.

If you always have to retain the types, what would be the use of void*s?
The point about them is that a void* may point to anything, pointers
included, which is what makes them painful for the gc.
Btw unions of pointer- and non-pointer types cause the same problem,
so it's not even all about void* (probably most, though).

>> It is not technically correct to call prudently retained memory blocks
>> a "memory leak". Those are distinct concepts, in my book at least.
> It depends on how much gets prudently retained.  My experience so far is
> that long-running programs continue to retain more and more memory.  I
> would certainly call this a leak.

IIRC it could be that the current GC doesn't use all of the available
information for collecting. It might be worthwhile to fix this, but
it's not trivial.

Regards, Frank