[Article] D's Garbage Collector Problem

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 11 September 2014 at 00:27:40 UTC, Andrei 
Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 9/10/14, 1:11 PM, Peter Alexander wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 10 September 2014 at 20:01:40 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>> Orvid, where's that new GC when we need it? ;)
>>
>> Andrei posted this in the reddit thread:
>>
>> "OK that does it. I'm going to redesign and implement D's 
>> tracing
>> garbage collector using the core allocator I wrote a short 
>> while ago.
>>
>> Fatefully Walter Bright and I were talking about the GC over 
>> dinner last
>> night (I'm at cppcon in Seattle!) and I figured if this is 
>> what matters
>> for D, I'll have to do it. And it does matter. It's actually 
>> not that
>> difficult especially given that we have a solid allocator 
>> backend."
>
> It was about time! -- Andrei

Thank you very much for tackling this problem.

GC hasn't been a problem for me (yet!), but the article is very 
convincing. Writing an JIT compiler whose performance is as good 
as or even better than C(++)'s is something one should be able to 
do in D, there's no doubt about it.

The author of the aforementioned article apologizes for the "bad 
publicity" he may have caused. On the contrary, I think he has 
done D a big favor. Through the attention his article got, the 
(programming) world knows now that D will get a much better GC, 
which will (hopefully) bring D back on the radar of those who had 
already discarded it because of its poor GC. Also, unlike the 
corporate world, we should not be afraid of "bad publicity". If 
there is a real problem, it's better to talk about it and fix it 
than to cover it up and drag it along.