More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/11/2014 11:18 AM, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
> 1. Use a scheme that takes a snapshot of the heap, stack and registers at the
> moment of collection and do the actual collection in another thread/process
> while the application can continue to run. This is the way Leandro Lucarellas
> concurrent GC works (http://dconf.org/2013/talks/lucarella.html), but it relies
> on "fork" that doesn't exist on every OS/architecture. A manual copy of the
> memory won't scale to very large memory, though it might be compressed to
> possible pointers. Worst case it will need twice as much memory as the current
> heap.
>
> It would be very interesting how far we can push this model on the supported
> platforms.

This is worth doing even if it is only possible on a subset of platforms. D 
should not be constrained to the worst of all the platforms.

My recollection is that Leandro ran into some serious reentrancy problems in the 
Linux API. Was this ever resolved?