On Friday, 27 April 2012 at 15:59:50 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:55:02 -0400, Rene Zwanenburg
<renezwanenb...@gmail.com> wrote:
Which reminds me, does the GC actually block all threads while
calling the destructors on garbage? I'm far from an expert on
GC's, but I believe the mark needs to stop the world, but the
sweep can be done concurrently. If the GC thread calls
destructors while the other threads aren't waiting, there
shouldn't be a problem.
AFAIK, this is how it works (world is resumed during sweep).
Otherwise, you would have deadlocks all over the place where
you used mutexes in dtors! Given that arbitrary C library
calls may lock something somewhere, there is no way to avoid
this.
The one thing you *can't* do is allocate GC memory inside a
dtor.
-Steve
Great, thanks. That'll save me a lot a trouble. I've run a few
times in the 'dtor allocating memory' problem, but it's usually
easy enough to work around. One more question: Is that a
limitation of the current GC implementation, or something
intrinsic to garbage collection in general?
