D garbage collector and real-time systems

[Tom via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 30 January 2015 at 11:54:54 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
> On 01/28/2015 09:12 AM, Mike wrote:
>>
>> Note that D has 3 built-in types: exceptions, dynamic arrays, 
>> and
>> associative arrays, that may be difficult to use without the 
>> GC:
>> http://dlang.org/builtin.html.
>
> 4 actually, if you count delegate closures.
> http://dlang.org/function.html#closures

My apologies for posting a question and then disappearing for 
eighteen months.  I thought it might be useful if I posted some 
feedback here.

We ended up going with Lua here.  The main point in favour was 
the iterative GC which can be interrupted and so can meet 
deterministic deadlines.

I was aware when I posted that it's possible to write D that 
doesn't use the garbage collector; however, since we want 
operators to be able to write bits of script that would get 
compiled and executed, we couldn't see any obvious way of 
presenting a 'safe' subset of the language; anything we did would 
either let them do things that would invoke the garbage collector 
(often in fairly unobvious ways) or enter code that would compile 
but fail to run (if we built the runtime without the GC).

Regards,
Tom