The problem with the D GC

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== Quote from Bill Baxter (dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com)'s article
> Sean Kelly wrote:
> >> This seems to be a very big issue.  The GC seems to be pretty much
> >> useless right now if you're going to have a lot of floating point data
> >> in your app.
> >
> > For what it's worth, I ran the test above with the modified GC in Tango,
> > for 10000 iterations of the "while(1)" loop.  The default behavior
> > roughly matched Phobos, with an 89 second run time and over 340MB of
> > memory consumed and growing steadily.  Then I told the GC to not scan
> > the arrays using the following calls:
> >
> >     gc.setAttr( data.ptr, GC.BlkAttr.NO_SCAN );
> >     gc.setAttr( incoming.ptr, GC.BlkAttr.NO_SCAN );
> >
> > A test with these changes in place dropped the run time to 7 seconds
> > with 43MB of memory consumed and not growing.
> >
> > I grant that this isn't quite as nice as if D just figured out whether
> > to scan the block using TypeInfo, but at least it grants the programmer
> > a way to customize GC behavior somewhat to tune application performance.
> >  The only stipulation with the current implementation is that block
> > attributes will not be preserved if an array is resized.  This isn't
> > terribly difficult to fix, but I haven't done so yet.
> I'd certainly be willing to do that sort of thing in my code to make the
> problem go away in the short term.  In my case all of those setAttr
> calls would be hidden away in library code, so it wouldn't make life any
> harder for everyday use.
> But it's not much use as a workaround until Tango is actually
> downloadable somewhere.  :-)
> Once Tango is available, though, that would certainly be better than the
> alternative of rewriting my library to use malloc/free.  If that's going
> to be necessary then I think I'll just as soon go back to C++ where at
> least I can use smart pointers.  The integrated GC is the #1 reason I'm
> using D in the first place, and if I can't realistically use that then I
> might as well be using C++.
> --bb

I feel the same way. Without GC, D is just C++ with a few more features.