Slices and GC

[BLM]

On Thursday, 5 April 2012 at 15:30:45 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
wrote:

>
> The GC can't really know which parts of the array you're using. 
> For example, your only reference to the array might be a 
> pointer, and you might be traversing the array in either 
> direction, only keeping count of the remaining bytes until the 
> array boundary.
>
> Consider .dup-ing the slices you're going to need, or using 
> std.mmfile to map the file into memory - in that case, the OS 
> won't load the unnecessary parts of the file into memory in the 
> first place.

I had considered using .dup, but I wanted to minimize overhead. I 
should probably look into std.mmfile or pull the data out in 
smaller chunks that the GC can handle individually.
If the GC can distinguish between pointers and slices, it should 
theoretically be able to prune an array that is only referenced 
by slices, but I'm not sure how well that would fit into the 
current GC system.