Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management

[Sean Kelly]

== Quote from renoX (renosky at free.fr)'s article
> The same authors have made a VM friendly GC, it is linked at the end the
> article..
> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2391
> The are two drawback of their GC:
> 1) The OS needs to be modified so that the VM and the GC communicate.
> 2) It is a moving GC, in the original paper they compares their GC with
> moving and non-moving variant and the moving one win.
> For Java this isn't an issue, but for D it is: working with C's library
> wouldn't work if the GC is a moving one..
> I don't know how to fix this one..

There is published research regarding VM-aware garbage collectors, and creating one for D wouldn't be
terribly difficult.  Portability is more of an issue, as you've mentioned.  I believe plugging one into
Windows isn't terribly difficult, but for *nix it can require a kernel re-compile to get access to the
proper hooks.  Because of this, I don't think that VM-aware GCs are the best general purpose solution,
even though their performance can be quite good.


Sean