Future of memory management in D

[Paulo Pinto]

On Wednesday, 17 November 2021 at 10:59:19 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> On Wednesday, 17 November 2021 at 02:10:02 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
>>
>> I'm confused by this because it seems as if the managed C++ 
>> iterations from Microsoft do not have much traction. What is 
>> the benefit of different types for GC/non-GC pointers?
>
> Managed C++ is now named C++/CLI and it is probably still there 
> if you want to use it. Not many use C++/CLI and I suspect that 
> people simply use C# instead as it is a much better alternative 
> for most cases.

It is mostly used to consume those COM APIs that Windows team 
keeps doing only for C++ consumption and are harder to get 
straight with plain P/Invoke, or RCW/CCW.

>
> The benefit of a special type for managed pointers is that you 
> can change the implementation of the GC fairly easily as well 
> as incorporate metadata under the hood. Tracing GC is not 
> suitable for low latency programs/embedded, but reference 
> counting can be a viable alternative for the low latency 
> programs.

PTC and Aicas are in business for the last 25 years doing real 
time GC for embedded.

It is a matter of who's on the team,

"Hard Realtime Garbage Collection in Modern Object Oriented 
Programming Languages."

https://www.amazon.com/Realtime-Collection-Oriented-Programming-Languages/dp/3831138931/

Basically the foundation background for the Aicas product, the 
thesis written by one of the founders,

"Distributed, Embedded and Real-time Java Systems"

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4419-8158-5

Given that D is still in the philosophical search of it wants to 
double down on GC or not, such optimizations aren't possible.