DIP18: Non-GC threads

[SomeDude]

On Saturday, 1 September 2012 at 02:52:23 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> One more comment, a quotation from the DIP18:
>
>>Currently, all functions can use garbage collected memory. 
>>Threads that call those functions must be managed by the 
>>garbage collector, which may occasionally suspend them to 
>>perform collection. This can lead to unwanted pauses, that are 
>>not acceptable in some situations, mainly real-time audio/video 
>>processing, gaming, and others.<
>
> C heap functions like malloc(), calloc(), realloc() have the 
> same problem, their run-time is not deterministic, so if you 
> don't want pauses a @noheap is useful.
>
> @noheap is not meant to forbid calling low-level 
> system-specific memory allocation functions.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

It looks very much that several annotations are actually directed 
at the compiler or the runtime for specific optimisations.
The @ could be used (or are used) as local compiler switches or 
runtime hints.