Remember the Vasa! by Bjarne Stroustrup

[Dave Jones]

On Tuesday, 29 May 2018 at 21:06:52 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 30, 2018 08:43:33 rikki cattermole via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On 30/05/2018 8:37 AM, Tony wrote:
>> > On Tuesday, 29 May 2018 at 20:19:09 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> >> I don't think it's difficult to do that yourself. There's 
>> >> no need to have a formal split. One example is that it's 
>> >> really nice to have the GC available for part of the 
>> >> program and avoid it for another part. @nogc gives you a 
>> >> guarantee. Different variants of the language are a special 
>> >> case of this that is equivalent to annotating the entire 
>> >> program to restrict behavior. That's rarely desirable.
>> >
>> > What would be an example of a type of application (or maybe 
>> > that should be "which type of domain" or "which type of 
>> > developer") where you would want part of it to do garbage 
>> > collection and the rest of it do not do garbage collection?
>>
>> GUI's, audio systems, language tooling, games, I'm sure 
>> somebody can come up with a much more longer list.
>
> Basically, stuff that can't afford to have the GC pause the 
> program for more than a millisecond or two has to be careful 
> with the GC, but your average program is going to be perfectly 
> fine with it, and in many cases, it's just part of the program 
> that can't afford the pause - e.g. a thread for an audio or 
> video pipeline. The rest of the program can likely afford it 
> just fine, but that thread or group of threads has to be at 
> least close to realtime, so it can't use the GC.

You cant call any code that might take a lock if you're doing 
real time audio, so that means no malloc/free either. That's 
standard practice. You either allocate everything up front or you 
do something like I do which is lock free queues ferrying things 
to and from the audio thread as needed.

I mean the point is needing different memory management for 
different parts of the program is already a thing with real time 
audio, GC doesnt really change that.