Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers

[jmh530]

On Tuesday, 9 April 2024 at 14:14:08 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> [snip]
>> 
>> Sing along with me: ~~ write barriers ~~
>> 
>> :)
>
> Write barriers!  We've been singing this tune for literally 
> years. It's about time we actually did it instead of merely 
> talking about it!
>
>
> T

If something hasn't happened for years, usually there are good 
reasons why. Walter raised some recently here [1].

If you force everything to go through the GC, then you avoid some 
complexity, but you have the added cost of write barriers all the 
time.

If you're in a mixed memory environment, you end up needing two 
types of pointers (one managed, one unmanaged) and that leads to 
a lot of complications that people tend to not want to deal with.

[1] https://forum.dlang.org/post/uv1l7p$2tu2$1@digitalmars.com