The GC (agian)

[Commander Zot]

On Saturday, 20 November 2021 at 13:48:44 UTC, JG wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Having been hanging around these forums for a few years now 
> (and writing software in D during that time) I have noticed 
> that there are quite often disagreements about the GC.
>
> I was thinking about this and wondered if some of these 
> problems could be possibly
> eliminated by making the GC more configurable. For instance one 
> might envisage
> that one can with some nice API be able do things like:
> (a) specify exactly when the GC should do a stop the world mark 
> and sweep (not when it feels like it when it needs to allocate 
> memory and perhaps through an API more pleasant than the 
> current, enable and disable mechanism);
> (b) specify that the next allocations should be done into a 
> preallocated block (which it could be asked to drop later, 
> without marking and sweeping).
>
> I guess my real question is more is there someway that the GC 
> be modified so that on the one hand it works exactly like it 
> does now (if no options are set) and on the other hand can be 
> configured so that it is close enough to manual memory 
> allocation that say someone building a game wouldn't find it 
> gets in there way.
>
> The main point would be to allow someone to fully use D (with 
> some extra house-keeping they have to do) but avoid 
> unpredictable GC pauses.
>
> I understand that this wouldn't satisfy everyone, but perhaps 
> it would be more feasible than some of the more drastic 
> proposals that get thrown around from time to time.
>
> If this is something that makes sense and would be useful I 
> would be willing to try and build it.
>
> [In case it is of interest to anyone, personally I like having 
> a GC, although there are a few instances where it would be nice 
> to have a bit more flexibility.]

If you want manual memory management you can do that today.
If you don't want the GC to stop the world you can create a 
thread not registered to to GC today.
Yes, you lose access to some language features that require 
automatic memory management.
But that is not that big of a deal when other languages like 
C/C++ don't even have those in the first place.

I'm all for improving the GC and providing more options, but IMHO 
there are more important things where your help could have a 
bigger impact on D usability.