On Thursday, 21 December 2017 at 10:49:46 UTC, Dan Partelly wrote:
I started to look into D very recently. I would like to know
the following, if you guys are so nice to help me:
1. What is the performance of D's GC, what trade-offs where
done in design , and if a in-deep primer on efficient usage and
gotchas of the current implementation exists.
I've never independently measured it myself, so I can't say.
2. GC is never good enough. What are the current plans in this
area for D.
The -betterC feature come to mind. Walter is trying to convert
the DMD compiler's backend to D (It's still written in C-like
C++; only the frontend is in D). For reasons I don't quite
understand, he wants to use -betterC and RAII:
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/7421#issuecomment-350874126
But the GC isn't required. D is an extraordinarily powerful
language with which you can work around just about any limitation.
https://wiki.dlang.org/Memory_Management
https://p0nce.github.io/d-idioms/#The-impossible-real-time-thread
In general, please point me to the place where current work on
D is done.
Work on the D programming language is done primarily in 3
different repositories:
DMD (reference compiler) - https://github.com/dlang/dmd
DRuntime (language runtime library) -
https://github.com/dlang/druntime
Phobos (standard library) - https://github.com/dlang/phobos
3. I need to be able to run with GC totally disabled sometimes.
In the light of this:
- are there any features of core language which depend on
garbage collection ? (i.e unbound arrays, strings ..)
Yes, Exceptions, classes, dynamic arrays, and associative arrays
come to mind. But, keep in mind that there are always ways to
word around this.
- are there any features from standard library which depend
on active garbage collection?
I'm not a big user of the standard library, but I believe most
features of the standard library require the GC.
- Please point me to a list where there is an exhaustive
enumeration of which language features *and* library features
requires GC active. Looking at standard library docs I did not
seen markings which identify clearly and unequivocally what
requires GC active and what not.
I don't think such a list exists. You can compile code with the
@nogc attribute and the compiler emit errors if you attempt to
use the GC.
The -vgc compiler option will also tell you where you have GC
allocations.
4. Is Andrei Alexandrescu's book from 2009 on D still actual,
or the language evolution made it obsolete ?
I think there is still great information in that book, and Andrei
is always a fun author to read. However, "Programming in D" is
probably the best place to start -
http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html
Some D books are currently on sale for $5 at Packt Publishing:
http://forum.dlang.org/post/mbczecvrworfwacmz...@forum.dlang.org
Mike
