D on next-gen consoles and for game development

[deadalnix]

On Saturday, 25 May 2013 at 05:18:12 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 25 May 2013 15:00, deadalnix <deadalnix at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, 25 May 2013 at 01:56:42 UTC, Manu wrote:
>>
>>> Understand, I have no virtual-memory manager, it won't page, 
>>> it's not a
>>> performance problem, it will just crash if I mis-calculate 
>>> this value.
>>>
>>
>> So the GC is kind of out.
>>
>
> Yeah, I'm wondering if that's just a basic truth for embedded.
> Can D implement a ref-counting GC? That would probably still be 
> okay, since
> collection is immediate.
>

This is technically possible, but you said you make few 
allocations. So with the tax on pointer write or the reference 
counting, you'll pay a lot to collect very few garbages. I'm not 
sure the tradeoff is worthwhile.

Paradoxically, when you create few garbage, GC are really goos as 
they don't need to trigger often. But if you need to add a tax on 
each reference write/copy, you'll probably pay more tax than you 
get out of it.

> Modern consoles and portables have plenty of memory; can use a 
> GC, but
> simpler/embedded platforms probably just can't. An alternative 
> solution
> still needs to be offered for that sort of hardware.