Concern about dmd memory usage on win32

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, December 07, 2012 21:21:17 deadalnix wrote:
> On Friday, 7 December 2012 at 16:23:49 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
> 
> wrote:
> > If you look in win32.mak, you'll see that the source files are
> > split into
> > separate groups (STD_1_HEAVY, STD_2_HEAVY, STD_3, STD_4, etc.).
> > This is
> > specifically to combat this problem. Every time that we reach
> > the point that
> > the compilation starts running out of memory again, we add more
> > groups and/or
> > rearrange them. It's suboptimal, but I don't know what else we
> > can do at this
> > point given dmd's limitations on 32-bit Windows.
> > 
> > - Jonathan M Davis
> 
> I don't know? Maybe disabling the GC because it slowed down dmd
> wasn't a good idea after all.
> 
> Who care about a fast compiler is that one crashes ?
> 
> It does crash ! Yes but at least, it is fast !

Most programs compile just fine as things are, and Walter cares a _lot_ about 
speed of compilation, so doing something harms the common case in favor of a 
less common one that doesn't even work right now didn't seem like a good idea. 
But really what it comes down to is that it was an experimental feature that 
clearly had problems, so it was temporarily disabled until it could be sorted 
out. All that means is that things were left exactly as they were rather than 
introducing a new element that could have caused problems. Further 
investigation and work _does_ need to be done, but without proper testing and 
further work being done on it, it probably _isn't_ a good idea to enable it. 
As with many things around here, the trick is that someone needs to spend time 
working on the problem, and no one has done so yet.

- Jonathan M Davis