The "no gc" crowd

[Benjamin Thaut]

Am 09.10.2013 07:15, schrieb Manu:
>
> I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of experts, plenty of
> conversations at dconf, and nobody could even offer me a vision for a GC
> that is acceptable.
> As far as I can tell, nobody I talked to really thinks a GC that doesn't
> stop the world, which can be carefully scheduled/time-sliced (ie, an
> incremental, thread-local GC, or whatever), is even possible.
>

I have to fully agree here. I recently bought and read the book "The 
handbook of garbage collection". And the base requirement they make for 
basically every garbage collector that is a little bit more advancted 
then a impercise mark & sweep is that you know the _exact_ location of 
_all_ your pointers. And thats where D's problems come from. Its quite 
easy to know all pointers on the heap but the real problem are the 
pointers on the stack. If we really want a state of the art GC we need 
fully working pointer discovery first.

Regarding the GC D's biggest problem is, that it was designed to require 
a GC but it was not designed to actually support a GC.

And thats why I don't believe that there will ever be a GC good enough 
in D to fullfill realtime or soft-realtime requirements.

Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut