On Friday, 4 July 2014 at 14:10:29 UTC, bearophile wrote:
D: y u no distinguish between ints/longs/floats/doubles and pointers when taking out the trash? You argue that internal pointers make implementing a precise garbage collector (which wouldn’t mistake numbers for pointers) impossible, but Go managed it in spite of also having internal pointers.
It is true that a precise (and moving) GC is desirable for long running servers, and that the Go GC has been receiving a lot of love; it's now stack precise with Go 1.3.
I don't recall anyone arguing that internal pointers make a precise GC impossible. But there are plenty of D features that complicate a precise GC, amongst them internal pointers. IMO, the D story around GC is currently one of the weaker parts of the language. Sure, there are workarounds, including not using the GC at all, but then so many features are tied to it that the interested developer may just decide to use a language with a more mature and precise GC, like Java or Go, or none at all like C.
