Suggestion: noInternalPointers property

[BCS]

Reply to Sean,

> == Quote from dsimcha (dsimcha at yahoo.com)'s article
> 
>> As I've mentioned previously, D's partially conservative garbage
>> collection is
>> often a significant limitation for me when working with large amounts
>> of data.
>> As a workaround, I'd like to suggest that the GC be given a
>> noInternalPointers function.  When called with a pointer to the start
>> of a
>> block, it would tell the GC to only consider pointers to the start of
>> the
>> block, not internal pointers.  This would prevent false pointers from
>> wreaking
>> havoc on large data structures.  In exchange, you'd have to be
>> careful that a
>> reference to the start of the data structure was somewhere on the
>> stack.  Of
>> course, you could still pass internal around all you wanted as long
>> as you
>> didn't try to return an internal pointer from the function that
>> allocated the
>> data structure.
>> The noInternalPointers property could also be a property of builtin
>> dynamic
>> arrays.  Appending a large amount of times to a large array breaks
>> the GC in
>> the current form because, when the array gets reallocated, the old
>> memory
>> blocks are not necessarily cleaned up due to the false pointer
>> problem.  If an
>> array has the noInternalPointers property, every time it is
>> reallocated due to
>> resizing, the pointer to the start of it would be automatically
>> marked with
>> the noInternalPointers attribute.
>> Does all this sound feasible/reasonable?
> It means that slices of an array won't keep the array data alive, but
> other than that I think it's reasonable.
> 
> Sean
> 

IIRC there is a contains pointers flag in the GC (and that's all I remember)