Random points from a D n00b CTO

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 14 July 2014 at 14:09:02 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Vic:
>
>> Xeon CPU lets you use 128Gig, 386 gig, 512 gig, etc. It has 
>> become cheap to do that. I need a system programing lang to do 
>> that better.
>
> Perhaps the D GC was never tested with such amounts of RAM (and 
> generally in D what is not accurately tested doesn't work).
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

FYI the problem I had with very large allocations were 
user-error. I have since successfully used very large amounts of 
memory (128GB +) with the GC.

However, I would say that it is not recommended. Very large heaps 
aren't conducive to good GC performance (especially with D's 
current GC). I now use a hybrid approach where the body of my 
data is on the C heap - managed manually - and all the scraps and 
difficult-to-track transient data are managed by the GC for 
convenience and correctness. I find it is a good compromise that 
introduces very little extra cognitive load over GC-only, but 
produces some good speedups.