Possibility of non stop-the-world GC in the future?

[Benjamin Thaut]

Am 18.02.2013 15:38, schrieb deadalnix:
> On Monday, 18 February 2013 at 12:54:24 UTC, Benjamin Thaut wrote:
>> The main problem is that programming with a GC encourages programming
>> with memory leaks. As the gc will take care of any leaked memory and
>> you don't get any feedback about how much memory you actually allocate.
>
> You can apply the same reasoning to any language feature.
>
> Bound checking encourage lazy buffer overflow checking. OOP and
> functional encourage indirect branching. And I can go on and on.
>

Of course. I'm just saing that in the field of game programming beeing 
aware of the memory layout and beeing aware in what way memory is used 
is the key factor for good performance. Having a GC makes it way to easy 
to just ignore all the memory related issues, which is why I don't like 
programming with a GC in the field of games.

> Everything that help a programmer is generally good, as long as getting
> performances back is allowed with extra work (what GC.free allows you to
> do). In other terms, if you free what you allocate you get back to
> manual memory management (well, expect some runtime weirdness).
>
>> Also even if you do manual pooling and use a GC you still pay a big
>> performance impact because the GC will scan the pooled memory without
>> actually freeing anything. But scanning takes time too. And those
>> interrupts by the GC will be long enough to interrupt regular gameplay.
>> D would at least need a incremental Mark & Sweep to be usable in
>> games. But in my opinion a GC is not needed at all when developing
>> games, it makes a lot of sense for other fields though.
>
> You'll find that in term of memory management, no magic solution exists.
> Sometime GC is faster, sometime relying on manual memory management is
> the best. Most of a the time an hybrid approach between several
> techniques best results.

Agreed. But as long as D does not have a Garbage Collector that is as 
powerfull as the GC of the .NET 4 runtime you will be better of 
(performance wise) not using a GC at all when programming performance 
critical parts of game engines.


-- 
Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut