Thread-local GC?

[Sean Kelly via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 16:20:43 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
> On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 02:51:05 UTC, logicchains wrote:
>> I was wondering if thread-local GC had been considered an 
>> option for making D's GC work better in threaded code? Erlang 
>> has this (well, process-local GC, which is closer to 
>> fibre-local in D terms) and it seems to work okay, although I 
>> don't think Erlang allows shared memory between processes.
>>
>> If this were possible, it would be particularly useful if it 
>> could be combined with nogc to allow the spawning of nogc 
>> threads. These could be used for latency-sensitive work, with 
>> the guarantee that work done in a nogc thread would never be 
>> paused by garbage collection done in other threads.
>
> I really like this idea.  It would neatly address my issues 
> with a long-standing pull request for adding provisions to 
> core.thread for creating threads that should not be blocked by 
> the GC on collections.  Just add detection in the Thread ctors 
> for the @nogc label and set the appropriate internal flag.
>
> It's still kind of a veneer over potentially risky code, since 
> @nogc code can manipulate references to data in the GC and so 
> be the sole owner of data that will then vanish on the next 
> collection, but it seems a good way to document what's desired 
> and enforce some degree of correctness.

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/pull/493

Given the changes, it may be worth rejecting the pull request 
above and creating a new one for this approach, but this is the 
history anyway.