Moving GC

[Christopher Wright]

dsimcha wrote:
> However, after thinking about it, I doubt D will go the route of moving/more
> precise GC.  I know I've advocated it in the past, but I've realized that false
> pointers aren't generally that big a deal if you delete a few huge (>1MB) objects
> manually.  Furthermore, I think it's necessary in a systems programming language
> to be able to allocate a big chunk of untyped memory.  Technically, this could
> still be done with a moving GC by using the C heap, but it would make things
> really, really complicated.

You'd have to do more bookkeeping:
- this memory is referenced by something that I know is a pointer
- this memory is referenced by something that might be a pointer (or 
some random bit pattern)
- this memory is not referenced

This isn't unreasonable, and it really just depends on how complete and 
how fast D's runtime reflection is.