Conspiracy Theory #1

[Sean Kelly]

dsimcha Wrote:
> 
> Yes, and similarly, when I write code to do some complicated processing of gene
> expression data or DNA sequences, and it uses RAM measured in gigabytes, I go to
> similar lengths to avoid GC for similar reasons.  (That and false pointers.)  It's
> not unique to server space.  The reason I still use D instead of C or C++ is
> because, even if I'm using every hack known to man to avoid GC, it's still got
> insane metaprogramming capabilities, and it's still what std.range and
> std.algorithm are written in.

In our case, we're running on machines with 64 GB or more of physical RAM, and using all of it.  I think we could get away with GC for certain processing where it's convenient so long as we had per-thread GCs and used malloc/free for the bulk of our data (feasible, since most everything has a deterministic lifetime).  D seems like a great language in this respect, since it doesn't require GC use for every allocation.