[RFC]Proposal for better garbage collection

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-02-22 20:40, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 07:56:15PM +0100, Benjamin Thaut wrote:
>> As I'm not satisfied with the current GC D has and don't see the
>> situation improving in the future without significant changes to the
>> compiler I wrote the following document that points out all the
>> possible issues with garbage collection I could think of and
>> possible solutions for them. This document is just a draft and only
>> a proposal, critics and comments are welcome.
>
> Have you seen this?
>
> 	http://www.llucax.com.ar/proj/dgc/index.html
>
>
> [...]
>> 2) Tracking references on the stack:
>>
>> The D compiler always needs to emit a full stack frame so that the
>> GC can walk up the stack at any time in the program. The stack frame
>> of every function generated by the D compiler starts which a
>> bitfield (usually the size of a machine register) where each bit
>> indicates that these bytes are a pointer / reference. The bitfield
>> needs to be large enough to cover the whole stack frame of the
>> function.
>
> This adds a lot of overhead to the runtime stack, esp. if you have deep
> recursion. It's also not necessarily faster, since the GC now has to
> parse a bitfield (a variable-length encoded bitfield, no less), instead
> of just scanning words directly, which can be optimized by CPU-specific
> microcode depending on the target platform.
>
>
> [...]
>> Every scope generated by the D compiler would need additional code
>> at the start and end of the scope. When the scope is entered the
>> bitfield would be patched to represent the new variables inside the
>> scope and when the scope is left the bitfield is patched again to
>> remove the changes that were made on entering the scope.
>
> This would introduce quite a lot of overhead per scope. It will also
> lead to strange things like:
>
> 	if (x) y();	// faster
> 	if (x) { y(); }	// slower
>
> which will encourage people to omit {} after if, which makes code more
> fragile and hard to read.

Doesn't the "faster" example introduces an implicit scope?

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg