How to contribute to GC?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2014-01-10 08:26, Kira Backes wrote:
> Dear D users,
>
>
> I think the GC is the one are that is holding D the most back, so I’d
> like to help it. But I have no idea how. No, I’m not talking about the
> technical stuff, rather about the organizational stuff and the
> contribution workflow.
>
> It seems like sociomantics wanted to port CDGC to D2 but I did not see
> any work following that, they also wanted to refactor the existing GC
> but I also don’t think much has been done there. Then there is also a
> precise GC. It exists, but is anything planned for this to be included?
>
> So, I’d really like to help with the GC but I have no idea how.
> - There is no overview of what people are doing on the GC or their GC forks

As far as I know there are two efforts on improving the GC:

* Leandro Lucarella (sociomantics as you mentioned above) - Working on a 
concurrent GC. http://dconf.org/2013/talks/lucarella.html

* Rainer Schütze - Working on a concurrent GC. 
http://dconf.org/2013/talks/schuetze.html

> - I have basically no idea what of the current work will be included
> into Phobos, so I don’t what to base my contribution on
> - I don’t know which ideas I could work on so that they eventually will
> be included
> - Finally, I don’t know what the core D team is already planning or what
> their vision is, what they’re planning themselves, what they want to see
> in D, what they will accept as contribution

As far as I know nothing is decided. We all just know we want a better 
GC. I have not heard anything from the core D team. What's missing is 
someone to finish the work and create a pull request.

> Maybe we need a project page or a group or something for the GC? Where
> we can collect all ideas, see who’s working on what, see what’s wanted
> and so on.

That would probably be a good idea. Perhaps on the wiki 
http://wiki.dlang.org/

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg