On Sunday, 12 January 2014 at 10:40:50 UTC, Benjamin Thaut wrote:
Am 12.01.2014 11:27, schrieb Rainer Schuetze:
I think a moving collector is currently not feasible without
restricting
the language a lot, probably similar to safe D and more. I'm
not sure we
want that in general.
I'd rather have more restrictions and a working precise GC, and
let those who wish to do without the
safety ask for it explicitly.
Could you give an example which part of the language would not
be doable with a moving collector? The only thing that comes to
my mind is unions and that problem can be solved by allowing
the user to specify manual scanning functions for structs or
classes containing unions.
How would the moving GC deal with pointer arithmetic?
Also I don't think that we can create a GC which performs as
good as the one of Java or C# if we are not willing to make the
neccessary changes for a moving gc.
I agree. Even ignoring the comparison with Java/C#, I think if D
is to be a 'fully garbage collected language' then it will have
to support a state of the art GC.
