Will the D GC be awesome?

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 03-10-2012 23:26, DypthroposTheImposter wrote:
>    D is pretty cool, perhaps someday I can use it instead of C++ and
> have cool shit like fast build times, modules, no more bloody headers,
> sane templates, CTFE, UFCS etc
>
>   But can the D GC ever be made:
>
> 1. precise

Yes. Work is being done.

> 2. able to scale to large-ish data set(2gig+)

Parallel marking is perfectly possible even with a conservative GC. I've 
been meaning to look into this.

> 3. No long stalls(anything over a couple millisecond(<3))

A (non-real time) GC can't really make guarantees about pause times. 
While having a real time GC might be nice, it'd take an incredible 
amount of engineering effort.

>
> Q. Curious, would it be compacting?

In theory, it is possible to do this for some heap objects, but I 
suspect that it would do more harm than good in a systems language.

>
>   If not then I'm stuck not using it much--
>
> Which leaves me with structs, and lets just say D struct are not
> impressive--

?

>
>
> * Oh and on a totally unrelated note, D needs Multiple return values.
> Lua has it, it's awesome. D doesn't want to be left out does it?

Use tuples. Multiple return values (as far as ABI goes) are impractical 
because every major compiler back end (GCC, LLVM, ...) would have to be 
adjusted for every architecture.

>
> * OpCmp returning an int is fugly I r sad

It's a sensible design decision. What would be the alternative?

>
> * why is haskell so much shorter syntax, can D get that nice syntax
> plssssssssss

D is a C-family language.

>
> STAB!
>

-- 
Alex Rønne Petersen
alex at lycus.org
http://lycus.org