Possibility of non stop-the-world GC in the future?

[Benjamin Thaut]

Am 18.02.2013 16:08, schrieb Sergei Nosov:
> On Monday, 18 February 2013 at 10:35:59 UTC, Benjamin Thaut wrote:
>> I wen't down this path already and I ended up not using the GC at all:
>>
>> http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20
>
> http://dlang.org/garbage.html has a list of features that rely on GC and
> I would say everything in this list is something you cannot (simply) do
> without dynamic allocation.
>
> And as far as I'm concerned, you don't want to use even dynamic
> allocation in a game due to real-time constraints, since any dynamic
> allocation is non-deterministic. I don't know any "serious" project that
> doesn't use pre-allocation and stuff.

Well games are only soft-realtime. So you can afford having dynamic 
allocations. But you are correct. For dynamic allocations it is usually 
tried to use custom allocators which are backed by preallocated memory 
blocks. But still its a lot less of a problem to use malloc a free on a 
even during the simulation compared to a stop the world mark & sweep.

>
> Do I understand it correctly, that you pointed out the parts in
> druntime/phobos that "overrely" on GC (could be done without it, but
> done otherwise)?

Yes correct. But if you would do them otherwise you wouldn't need a GC 
in the first place. The whole point of the GC is that you can be more 
productive by not caring about this stuff.

>
> Cause if not - avoiding everything from that list should make GC present
> almost unnoticeable. And that's what you want to do anyways, whether GC
> is present or not, if you're really targeting real-time.

Correct. Still I rather have a system that gives me errors when I make 
hidden runtime allocations then having the GC clean them up for me. 
Coding by convetion never works out well, especially in lager teams.

Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut