D on next-gen consoles and for game development

[Michel Fortin]

On 2013-05-29 08:06:15 +0000, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> said:

> What do you think is easier, or perhaps even POSSIBLE in D?
> A good RC approach, or a V8 quality concurrent+incremental GC?
> I get the feeling either would be acceptable, but I still kinda like idea
> of the determinism an RC collector offers.

Given that both require calling a function of some sort on pointer 
assignment, I'd say they're pretty much equivalent in implementation 
effort. One thing the compiler should do with RC that might require 
some effort is cancel out redundant increments/decrement pairs inside 
functions, and also offer some kind of weak pointer to deal with 
cycles. On the GC side, well you have to write the new GC.

Also, with RC, you have to be careful not to create cycles with 
closures. Those are often hard to spot absent of an explicit list of 
captured variables.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/