More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 6 May 2014 at 06:39:19 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> a GC friendly set of D constructs where FFI is followed by 
> programmer guaranteed postconditions (specified by library 
> authors).

Btw "postcondition" is the wrong term. In order to be robust need 
to specify how far into the GC heap a FFI can go while it is 
live. Consider callbacks from C to D. You don't know the layout 
of the stack frame, so you have to scan the stack assuming 
anything unknown is a pointer.

But that is not sufficient, because the C code may be holding 
references to the GC heap in a malloc'ed struct. So, you have to 
scan all reachable malloc'ed memory too.

At the end of the day some discipline is required for system 
level programming because the robust solutions are very expensive.