If I had my way

[Chad J]

On 12/11/2011 08:15 AM, maarten van damme wrote:
> ...
> 
> I was only trying it "for the fun of it", not to be used seriously. D
> should always have it's GC support built-in and have some functions to
> control it's behaviour (core.memory). But I think that D, beeing a
> systems programming language, should also be able to be used without GC.
> I don't mean phobos to be writtin without a GC in mind but druntime
> should be compilable with something like a -nogc flag that make it
> usable without GC.
> 
> There are a lot of users out there who think that a GC produces terribly
> slow programs, big hangs while collecting,... (thank java for that.
> Right now the java GC has been improved and it's extremely good but the
> memory stays :p)
> Letting them know that D can be run without GC can be a good point. If
> they don't like it, they can turn it off.

I think one thing that could would be (optional) reference counting for
transitively atomic types.  Of course, this is just another kind of
garbage collection, but it is /deterministic/ and parallelizes well, and
I bet this would open up a large amount of Phobos while the
stop-the-world collector is offline, and with little or no code change.

The big example in my mind is strings.  Strings are straight-up atomic.
 They can't have the reference cycles that would confuse a reference
counter.  And if we allowed them to be reference-counted, then all of
the string functions using copy-on-write would now work with the
stop-the-world collector disabled.

It's something I've been thinking of mentioning for a while, but I
suspect there are higher priority things at the moment.