DIP18: Non-GC threads

[Peter Alexander]

On Saturday, 1 September 2012 at 11:37:39 UTC, Piotr Szturmaj 
wrote:
> It's similar behavior to nothrow and pure. Instead of manually 
> avoiding GC allocations, compiler does this checks for you. 
> Imagine D doesn't have nothrow. You'd have to check every 
> called function to see if it doesn't throw. In big programs 
> throwing function may be left unnoticed and this is why we have 
> static nothrow checks in D.

I understand the benefit. However, there are at least two 
significant costs:

1. If I want my entire program to be GC free, I have to annotate 
every single function with 'nogc'. This is not something I want 
to do.

2. It's a new language feature and has all the associated costs: 
initial implementation, bug fixing, marking up of functions in 
Phobos, documentation, etc.

Yes, with my approach, a rare allocation may go unnoticed, and 
you end up with an undesirable GC collection sometime in the 
future. It's not great, but it's not the end of the world, and 
I'm willing to risk that to avoid the costs I mentioned above.