Nedmalloc

[janderson]

Craig Black wrote:
> "janderson" <askme at me.com> wrote in message 
> news:fvif08$1f4v$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> Just bring this topic a again.  Would it be possible to get Nedalloc 
>> either into Tango or Phobos?  It would make sense for D to have the 
>> fastest allocator.  It would be a very easy upgrade to D's speed which 
>> is one of D's marketing points.  Nedalloc was already ported by someone.
>>
>> http://nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedmalloc/index.html
>>
>> -Joel
> 
> I think the problem here is that people like you and I that care about 
> the manual allocators are in the minority.  Probably the vast majority 
> of D programmers don't use manual allocation at all, so the motivation 
> to incorporate a faster manual allocator is small, even if it is trivial 
> to do so.  IMO, a big reason that so few D programmers use manual 
> allocation is that not many programmers that care about performance are 
> programming in D. This is because D is slow for many tasks for two 
> primary reasons: slow GC and a poor compiler optimization.  
> (Fortunately, manual allocation can be used instead of GC.)  While 
> optimizing the GC and the compiler are big tasks, incorporating 
> nedmalloc is trivial, and represents a very large speedup for 
> applications that use manual allocation.
> 
> -Craig

Some good points. Its probably possible to implement nedmalloc as the 
backend for the GC.  ie just handle the malloc and free parts at let the 
GC handle traversal and dirty block determination.  Although that would 
take some work.

-Joel