D-

Piotr Szturmaj bncrbme at jadamspam.pl
Sat Feb 11 11:21:54 PST 2012


Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Saturday, February 11, 2012 19:00:51 q66 wrote:
>> What's so difficult on that? Slices do not require the GC, you
>> allocate once, slice many times, deallocate once.
>
> With dynamic arrays, the GC owns the memory, and _all_ dynamic arrays are
> slices. _None_ of them own their own memory. The GC keeps track of whether you
> have any slices for a particular memory block and deals with freeing up wth
> the block if you don't. However, if you allocate a dynamic array without the
> GC, then all of a sudden, it effectively owns its own memory, so the semantics
> of dealing with arrays and memories changes drastically. What happens when you
> slice it? Which one owns the memory? What happens when you try and do stuff
> like popFront on an array? All of a sudden, you have memory which is no longer
> referenced. It's been leaked.
>
> If you have a very careful scheme for handling memory, you _can_ slice arrays
> without a GC, but you have to worry about all the bookkeeping of keeping track
> of the originally allocated memory and how many slices reference it so that
> you can free it when appropriate.
>
> Also, you can't concatenate to arrays at all, because that requires the GC.
>
> So, you're dealing with a mine field if you try and use D's array capabilities
> without a GC. Yes, you _can_ use some of them if you're _very_ careful, but
> I'd seriously advise just sticking to using arrays like you would in C except
> for the fact that arrays know their length.

Delphi has dynamic arrays and appendable strings without a GC. In Delphi 
pointers and objects are managed manually, but arrays and strings are 
managed automatically (ref counted with Copy-On-Write). Take a look at 
http://www.codexterity.com/delphistrings.htm. Maybe some Delphi 
solutions may be used in NoGcD?


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