Smart pointers instead of GC?

[Frustrated]

On Tuesday, 4 February 2014 at 00:19:53 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On Mon, 03 Feb 2014 15:26:22 -0800, Frustrated 
> <c1514843 at drdrb.com> wrote:
>
>> On Monday, 3 February 2014 at 21:42:59 UTC, Shammah Chancellor
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> You can always force the GC to run between cycles in your 
>>> game, and
>>> turn off automatic sweeps.  This is how most games operate 
>>> nowadays.
>>> It's also probably possible to create a drop-in replacement 
>>> for the GC
>>> to do something else.   I could see if being *VERY* useful to 
>>> make the
>>> GC take a compile-time parameter to select which GC engine is 
>>> used.
>>
>>
>> This is just non-sense. Maybe this is why modern games suck 
>> then?
>> How do you guarantee that the GC won't kick in at the most
>> inopportune times? Oh, you manually trigger it? When? Right at
>> the moment when the player is about to down the boss after a 45
>> min fight?
>>
>> Oh, right.. you just segfault cause there is no memory left.
>>
>> On Monday, 3 February 2014 at 22:51:50 UTC, Frank Bauer wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not quite sure that I understand what you mean by GC 
>>> avoidance being a major focus of 2014 though. In the long 
>>> term, can I look forward to writing an absolutely, like in 
>>> 100 %, like in guaranteed, GC free D app with all of current 
>>> D's and Phobos' features if I choose to? Or does it mean: 
>>> well for the most part it will avoid the GC, but if you're 
>>> unlucky the GC might still kick in if you don't pay attention 
>>> and when you least expect it?
>>
>> It's either got to be 100% or nothing. The only issue of the GC
>> is the non-determinism.... or if you do corner it and trigger 
>> it
>> manually you end up with exactly the types of problems Mr.
>> Chancellor thinks doesn't exist... i.e., the longer you have to
>> put off the GC the worse it becomes(the more time it takes to 
>> run
>> or the less memory you have to work with).
>>
>
> Why is this myth of non-determinism still alive? The only truly 
> non-deterministic GC's are concurrent collectors, but alas 
> concurrent collects don't routinely stop-the-world either, so 
> there really aren't any pauses to complain about. D's 
> Mark-Sweep GC is *perfectly* deterministic. It can  *only* 
> pause on allocation. Ergo you can determine exactly which 
> allocation caused the problem. You might not expect the 
> function you called to GC-allocate, but that doesn't make it 
> non-deterministic, just not what you expected. Please, stop 
> blaming your missed expectations on the GC. This 
> non-determinism thing is a red herring that is repeated over 
> and over by people who obviously have no idea what they are 
> talking about.
>

What I want you to do then is tell me exactly which allocation
will stop the world. You claim it is deterministic so it should
be obvious... hell, it shouldn't even require any code to monitor
what the GC is doing. With manual allocation and deallocation I
can see exactly when the memory will be allocated and free'ed.
That is deterministic.

Just because you want to use an all encompassing definition that
is meaningless doesn't mean you are right. RNG's are
deterministic using your definition, but that is a useless
definition.