[phobos] Fix for array append cache holding data hostage

[Steve Schveighoffer]

Cross-posting to both phobos and druntime for a wider audience...

For those of you not familiar with how the array appending cache works, it 
essentially caches recent lookups of BlkInfo for non-shared array appends.

What this means is that appending to an unshared array does not have to take the 
global GC lock, and allows a lookup to happen almost immediately.

One of the things that the cache required was to keep that array in memory.  
Otherwise, there was a possibility that the array would be collected and 
reallocated.  An append to such an array would result in the stale cache entry 
being used as the block info, possibly resulting in the wrong start address, 
wrong size, or wrong flags, all of which could be fatal.  A good prior 
discussion for this issue is listed in this bug: 
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3929

In order to solve the problem, I implemented a GC collection hook which runs 
*after* the mark phase, but before all threads are resumed.  This hook tests all 
cache entries to see if any of them are about to be collected.  Any entries 
which are not marked (i.e. about to be collected) are removed from the cache.

I also had to do some funky stuff with the cache since TLS data is also 
scanned.  So the cache is now in a malloc'd block that is freed on thread exit 
(and lazily allocated on first append).

One of the best tests that showed this problem (or so I thought) was posted to 
the newsgroup here: 
http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D.learn&article_id=22715


However, my patch does *not* fix this problem.  I've found that the true reason 
for the memory being held is that other data is pointing at the block.  With a 
200MB block, this is understandable.  In a 4GB address space, that's 1/20 of the 
valid address space. Any random aligned 4-byte sequence in the stack or TLS 
could point to it and prevent it from being collected.

The really bad thing about this is, once the true pointers to that block are 
gone, it could be lost forever.  The stack data which "points" to it may be very 
high up on the stack, which means it never gets collected.  It makes me wonder 
if we might want to provide an unsafe 'realloc' type function for appending that 
forcefully frees blocks that were used in an append loop.  A 'unique' type 
qualifier could go a long way here.

In any case, I still want to checkin this fix, because it at least removes the 
cache as a possible culprit (and fixes 3929).  I don't want to commit the patch 
until people here agree on the timing.  There is a possibility that it 
introduces memory corruption bugs (this happened the last time I was tinkering 
with array appending), so I don't want to destabilize everything if there is 
good reason.  Given that we just had a release, I think this would be a good 
time to do it.  I most likely won't get to it this weekend.

So anyone have any objections to me checking this in?

-Steve