garbage collection in d

[Daniel Oberhoff]

On 2010-04-06 22:47:40 +0200, bearophile <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> said:

> Daniel Oberhoff:
> 
> Just few comments on your post, other people will give you more answers.
> 
>> recently I even read one of the books (learn to tango with d)
> 
> That book is about D V.1 language, that is feature frozen. Most of the 
> efforts are now on D2 language, that adds and changes several things 
> (like the const system), and it currently uses only an improved version 
> of Phobos.
> 
> 
>> a) in the chaos that the language still seems to be in in that there is
>> no sharp specification and a lot of things changing rapidly
> 
> D1 is frozen, and D2 has recently stopped its quick development, now 
> it's mostly a work of refining few edges, removing many bugs and 
> implementing few parts missing still but already designed (and 
> improving Phobos, for example with data structures).
> 
> 
>> b) worries me a little. I am working towards real time systems with
>> tight time and sometimes also tight memory constraints, and a
>> conservative stop-the-world collector seems a bit daunting in this
>> context.
> 
> I think D GC has not being tested in stressfull serious situations yet.
> I am not expert on this, but I think the soft real time requirement are 
> not the main problem of the D GC, it starts working when you allocate 
> memory, and there are many ways to disable it or avoid it to work in 
> inner loops.
> It main problem is probably that it's not precise, so it can cause leaks.

oh :). so what are the biggest projects done with d so far ( one and two ) ?

> 
>> keep up the good work, maybe I can contribute sometime, till then I
>> will linger a little more. :)
> 
> You can start writing some benchmarks to test the things you care more 
> about :-)

I will see if I get round to it. I may have a go at trying to get a 
dsel for array expressions going. I have been doing some of that in c++ 
with boost proto, but its hard, and I suppose in d it may be easier, 
because a lot of the metaprogramming seems to be more straight forward. 
wondering if one could convince the proto coders to port it to d :).

> 
> Bye,
> bearophile