If I had my way

[Paulo Pinto]

Actually this could be good idea, it is after all where
Objective-C (with ARC) and C++ on Windows (C++/CX) are
moving to.

But there can be some performance issues nonetheless. I
am no GC expert, but I think in most cases the overhead
imposed by increment/decrement operations looses against
most advanced GC in use today.

--
Paulo

Am 11.12.2011 16:14, schrieb Chad J:
> On 12/11/2011 08:15 AM, maarten van damme wrote:
>> ...
>>
>> I was only trying it "for the fun of it", not to be used seriously. D
>> should always have it's GC support built-in and have some functions to
>> control it's behaviour (core.memory). But I think that D, beeing a
>> systems programming language, should also be able to be used without GC.
>> I don't mean phobos to be writtin without a GC in mind but druntime
>> should be compilable with something like a -nogc flag that make it
>> usable without GC.
>>
>> There are a lot of users out there who think that a GC produces terribly
>> slow programs, big hangs while collecting,... (thank java for that.
>> Right now the java GC has been improved and it's extremely good but the
>> memory stays :p)
>> Letting them know that D can be run without GC can be a good point. If
>> they don't like it, they can turn it off.
>
> I think one thing that could would be (optional) reference counting for
> transitively atomic types.  Of course, this is just another kind of
> garbage collection, but it is /deterministic/ and parallelizes well, and
> I bet this would open up a large amount of Phobos while the
> stop-the-world collector is offline, and with little or no code change.
>
> The big example in my mind is strings.  Strings are straight-up atomic.
>   They can't have the reference cycles that would confuse a reference
> counter.  And if we allowed them to be reference-counted, then all of
> the string functions using copy-on-write would now work with the
> stop-the-world collector disabled.
>
> It's something I've been thinking of mentioning for a while, but I
> suspect there are higher priority things at the moment.