Christopher Wright wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
I've discussed something with Walter today and thought I'd share it here.
The possibility of using D without a garbage collector was always
looming and has been used to placate naysayers ("you can call malloc if
you want" etc.) but that opportunity has not been realized in a seamless
manner. As soon as you concatenate arrays, add to a hash, or create an
object, you will call into the GC.
So I'm thinking there should be a flag -nogc that enables a different
model of memory allocation. Here's the steps we need to take:
This means replacing a mark/sweep GC with a reference counting GC.
It just means that certain types and constructs are rewritten. The exact
strategy depends on how Ref, Array, and AssocArray are defined.
Probably a good approach is to simply rewrite anything anyway and have
Ref vanish in gc mode by means of e.g. alias this.
So this means that we only need a flag -object=/path/to/object.d after all.
Andrei
