Componentizing D's garbage collector

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>]

On Monday, 13 January 2014 at 10:59:44 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Could we have a segregated heap for C pointers? Would that 
> help? Basically having a special function allocating everything 
> that should interface with C.

Is it possible to declare whether the C-function retains a 
pointer to the memory area or not, and to what extent? In general 
you will have to assume that the C code retains pointers not only 
to the object, but the transitive closure of anything that can be 
reached from it. That is quite extensive…

I also hope that the GC isn't fully modularized, because compiler 
support for specific GC strategies is likely to give better 
performance. Especially with whole program analysis.

It would be very nice to localize GC to a few threads. This  
would be useful in games where you only want to GC the AI/game 
mechanics portion of the simulated world, but use less demanding 
memory management for graphics, physics etc, which keeps running 
uninterrupted (one can interpolate/predict for a few frames 
giving the GC some more room to complete).