The problem with the D GC

[Sean Kelly]

Oskar Linde wrote:
> Oskar Linde wrote:
>> After having fought a while with D programs with runaway memory leaks, 
>> I've unfortunately had to come to the conclusion that the D GC is not 
>> ready for production use. The problem is what I'd call "spurious 
>> pointers". That is random data (strings, numbers, image data, audio or 
>> whatever) appearing to the GC to be full of pointers to all over the 
>> memory space.
> 
> I feel kind of bad for making it sound like this is a problem related 
> specifically to the D garbage collector. It is rather a general and 
> apparently well known problem of all conservative garbage collectors. 
> The D garbage collector is still excellent for a large domain of problems.
> 
> Lots of people seem to be having similar problems though, so a better 
> understanding of under what conditions a conservative garbage collector 
> will and will not work seems to be called for.

This link may be relevant:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-251.html

"Bounding Space Usage of Conservative Garbage Collectors" - Hans J. Boehm


Sean