On Friday, 12 October 2012 at 19:19:23 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 10/11/12 9:15 PM, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
http://xtzgzorex.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/demystifying-garbage-collectors/
Essentially an explanation of garbage collection for the
layman programmer. Though, it does assume some familiarity
with C and memory management. It's an abstract article not
particularly specific to any GC implementation, but I figured
I'd post it here anyway in case anyone's interested.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/11doh4/demystifying_garbage_collectors/
A question comes up, and I don't need an answer but it may be
useful to know, but I'm curious.
Does D include an index to bitmaps specifying which offsets in a
given memory block (say a class or a struct) of which fields
actually would point to memory? With the strong possibility of
working with manual pointer management it is possible it's not as
useful as it could be; But may be considered when making a GC.
Who knows, I may try my hand at it.
//some pseudo random number generator class
class Prng {
int seed;
int[] cached;
//mem location as good as any for an initial seed,
//maybe xor against time/date
this() {seed = cast(int) &this;}
}
The above may have a bitmap indexed to 00000_010b (or an index
so enum {nil, charArray, intArray} and thus [nil, intArray, nil],
so it would skip the ints and only check the only that actually
would contains a pointer. It could also effectively hold
additional information on the type for further indexing, so when
it sees 'cached' it will know it's an array, but if it was an
array to Objects, then it would scan every part of that inner
array mentioned for further references.
