Disable GC entirely

[Benjamin Thaut]

Am 10.04.2013 18:05, schrieb ixid:
>> It is possible, but it heavily crippeles the language and requires
>> modifications to druntime.
>>
>> See: http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20
>>
>> Also see my GC free version of druntime:
>> https://github.com/Ingrater/druntime
>>
>> My GC free version of phobos (heavily crippeled):
>> https://github.com/Ingrater/phobos
>>
>> And my little GC free "standard library":
>> https://github.com/Ingrater/thBase
>>
>> Its quite fun doing it when you want to learn new things, but I would
>> not recommend doing so in a real wordl project.
>
> Given what you have learned about GC-free D how practical would it be to
> modify D's core to work without garbage collection and then build
> libraries on top of this which make their GC use explicit? It seems to
> me that this is a level of modularity that should have been built in
> from the start.

For Druntime this is possible without much issues. For phobos it gets 
more compilcated especially for functions which have to allocate, like 
string processing functions and other things.

In my experience the API of an Library looks different if is uses a GC 
versus not using a GC. The advantage of a GC is that you can make the 
API more slim, easier to understand and "safe" because you know that you 
can rely on the GC.

Some parts of phobos already are written in a way that does not require 
a GC. E.g. std.random, std.traits, std.typetuple and others are useable 
right away.

The problem I see with such an approach is that everyone who is 
providing a library would basically have to maintain two version of the 
library. One without a GC and one with GC.

But with some compiler support it would be perfectly doable, it would 
just be more work.

Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut

-- 
Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut