Thread local and memory allocation

[Sean Kelly]

On Oct 3, 2011, at 3:55 PM, Walter Bright wrote:

> On 10/3/2011 12:48 PM, deadalnix wrote:
>> What do you think ? Is it something it worth working on ? If it is, how can I
>> help ?
> 
> It is a great idea, and it has been discussed before. The difficulties are when thread local allocated data gets shared with other threads, like for instance immutable data that is implicitly shareable.

Immutable data would have to be allocated on the shared heap as well, which means the contention for the shared heap may actually be fairly significant.  But the alternatives are all too complex (migrating immutable data from local pools to a common pool when a thread terminates, etc).  There's also the problem of transferring knowledge of whether something is immutable into the allocation routine.  As things stand, I don't believe that type info is available.