GC, the simple solution

[Larry Evans]

On 06/08/2006 06:04 PM, Sean Kelly wrote:
> Jeff Parsons wrote:
> 
[snip]
>> performance in mind? Sure, there are workarounds, but I haven't seen 
>> anything elegant yet that will let me use D for such applications 
>> without making my memory management more complicated than it would 
>> have been in C++. Is anything in the works?
> 
> 
> The spec doesn't contain any language forbidding such an approach, but I 
> don't think the popular compilers will support it by default.  Certainly 
[snip]
> programming.  That aside, there may be other approaches to garbage 
> collection that would make everyone happy and that don't require 
> additional code generation.  If you know of one, please say so.  My own 
> knowledge of the topic is limited to what I've read in research papers.
You could define a policy pointer which could have as one policy, the
current Boehm collector.  IOW, any ptr<BW> p(T) on the stack would be a
root pointer and each data structure would have a map of ptr<BW>
locations.  Similarly, there could be ptr<Copy> or ptr<IncBw> or even
ptr<deterministic> and ptr<collected> instead of the

   class [collected] SomeClass{...};
   class [deterministic] OtherClass{...}

proposed by Adrei here:

   http://tinyurl.com/o5zpm

This, of course, would require cooperation from the compiler, but
the same it would be true of:

   class [collected] SomeClass{...};

it's just that some specializations, ptr<collected>, would be
predetermined and others, for example, user-defined ones,
would not.