Configuring the Garbage Collector

[Ogion]

On Friday, 14 March 2025 at 09:14:38 UTC, cam-bam wrote:
> What effect does the disable:1 option have on garbage 
> collection?

It stops GC from running. Meaning, you can still allocate memory 
from GC heap and use all functionality that requires GC, but 
allocations will not trigger garbage collection (you can still 
run it manually with `GC.collect`).

> if I wanted to avoid the garbage collector entirely would it be 
> best to just use betterC or do manual memory management as 
> suggested by the 
> [blog](https://dlang.org/blog/2017/09/25/go-your-own-way-part-two-the-heap/)

BetterC is a subset of D with a reduced feature set. It removes 
all features that depend on DRuntime: not only GC but also 
classes, exceptions, RTTI etc. Phobos and D libraries are mostly 
incompatible with it. It’s meant for cases when you can’t use 
DRuntime, like if you’re targeting WebAssembly or some 
microcontroller.

Manual memory management doesn’t require disabling GC or writing 
in BetterC. Garbage collection can only be triggered when you 
allocate memory from the GC heap. But You can always use the good 
old `malloc` and `free`.

Probably, you don’t need to avoid GC in the entirety of your 
program. You can make the “hot” part of your code `@nogc` to make 
sure that you don’t accidentally use GC there, and freely use GC 
outside of it.