Is there a modern GC for D?

[Robert Jacques]

On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:51:37 -0500, Leandro Lucarella <llucax at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Robert Jacques, el 10 de febrero a las 01:03 me escribiste:
>> -Getting concurrent GC code correct is very hard. Boehm's algorithm,
>> for instance, looks extremely racy.
>
> There is a very simple concurrent GC model using fork()[1]. This is Unix  
> only
> though (and very dependent on how efficiently fork() is implemented in  
> the
> OS). I'm working (very slowly :) on implementing a GC based on this
> algorithm.
>
> No races, almost no synchronization. If the OS uses COW when fork()ing (I
> guess every modern OS does that), the only drawback is the copying of
> changed pages.
>
> [1] Nonintrusive Cloning Garbage Collector with Stock Operating System
>     Support.
>     http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/grr/snapshot-gc.ps
>

Cool. Hadn't thought of something so simple. I just watched a channel 9  
blog  
(http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going%20Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7-Redux/)  
and about half-way through they talk about new process reflection  
capabilities in Windows 7, which are an extension of fork, which they've  
had for a while (for posix compatibility, etc). Also, the PAGE_WRITECOPY  
protection should also allow this to work on Windows, at a finer grain.