-nogc

[Leandro Lucarella]

bearophile, el 23 de abril a las 07:08 me escribiste:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
> > The possibility of using D without a garbage collector was always
> > looming and has been used to placate naysayers ("you can call malloc if
> > you want" etc.) but that opportunity has not been realized in a seamless
> > manner. As soon as you concatenate arrays, add to a hash, or create an
> > object, you will call into the GC.
> 
> One simple possible solution: -nogc is to write C-like programs, with no
> automatic reference counting. It doesn't include the GC in the final
> executable (making it much smaller) and in such programs AAs and array
> concatenation and closures are forbidden (compilation error if you try
> to use them). "New" allocates using the C heap, and you have to use
> "delete" manually for each of them.  This is simple. While adding
> a second memory management system, ref-counted, looks like an increase
> of complexity for both the compiler and the programmers.

I definitely agree that -nogc should not imply reference counting garbarge
collection.

Now in Tango/Druntime you already can use a dummy GC that all it does is
calling C malloc/free for gc_malloc/gc_free, exactly for this purpose, so
what -nogc should do in that case is just link against the "stub" GC
instead to the "basic".

> >1. Put array definitions in object.d. Have the compiler rewrite "T[]" -> ".Array!(T)"<
> 
> That has to be done with care an in a transparent way, not adding the Array name in the namespace, so you can create an Array youself, etc.

srd.array.Array can be used, and leave T[] as a syntax sugar only (but you
could also write std.array.Array!(T) instead).

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (luca) | Blog colectivo: http://www.mazziblog.com.ar/blog/
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