Discusssion on the Discussion of the Design for a new GC

[Marco Leise via Digitalmars-d]

Am Wed, 23 Apr 2014 18:35:25 +0000
schrieb "Messenger" <dont at shoot.me>:

> What is the state of Rainer Schütze's precise gc? Duplication of 
> effort and all that.

+1. And I hope you know what you are up to :D. Some people
may expect a magic pill to emerge from your efforts that makes
the GC approx. as fast as manual memory management for typical
uses or at least as good as the one in Java. We must not
forget that Java has just-in-time compilation and no raw
pointer access. They might have found clever ways to make use
of features/restrictions in Java, that are not available to D.
Memory compaction is one from the top of my head.

I only know for sure that you are looking into using some
ideas from TCMalloc. Other than that, what are the exact
problems you are trying to solve? That would be good to know,
since different goals might require different implementations.
E.g. a precise GC is generally slowed down by checking
data types, but it doesn't keep memory alive because some
float variable happens to look like a pointer to it.

What are the limitations of garbage collection? As an example:
If someone loads some million items graph structure into
memory, can they still make any assumption about the run time
of GC.alloc()? Can generational collection be implemented?

-- 
Marco