Plan for D

[Johan Engelen]

On Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 03:58:15 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> On Sunday, 16 May 2021 at 03:46:50 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grostad 
> wrote:
>
>>
>> The fact that dmd does not ship with GC enabled speaks 
>> volumes...
>
> Hardly. dmd doesn't release memory, either. Does that "speak 
> volumes" about free? Neither is suitable for Walter's 
> performance goals with dmd. That's precisely why D allows you 
> to disable or avoid the GC when you need to.

Hi Mike,
   I have to agree with Ola on this point.
I too find it jarring that for something as simple (really) as a 
compiler, that a very simple bump-the-pointer memory allocation 
strategy without any freeing of memory is considered superior to 
the language's GC.

I do not buy the performance argument. The high memory 
consumption of the D compiler is a real issue, and it does hurt 
compilation performance. The amount of memory used frequently 
passes the available physical memory and paging isn't cheap. Or 
worse, the memory used exceeds the pagefile limit, and the 
compile just fails.
Speeding up a build by parallel compilation is not possible with 
a compiler that has such high memory demands.

Let's simply acknowledge the issue and move on. Ignoring it will 
just spawn more forum posts about it and drain our energy.

cheers,
   Johan