On Wednesday, 9 July 2014 at 13:01:36 UTC, bearophile wrote:
The huge amount of work done on the OracleVM GC that is not
easy to match.
D need for low-level code (currently user code can't tell the
GC what are the current actual contents of a union, this
includes Algebraic), D desire to interface efficiently to C
code.
I think it is a pity that there has been no real effort to
experiment with restricting/extending semantics in a way that
could lead to cache efficient GC collection.
1. annotate pointers that may point to GC memory (global dataflow
or explict)
2. ensure that regular memory retain pointers to GC memory when
it is live in C code
3. do global analysis of possible datastructures to minimize
scanned fields/structs
4. improve stack traversal speed
5. improve ADTs with GC performance-enhancing features to reduce
scanning
6. optional fat GC pointer implementations to get faster scanning
But yeah, if one insists on having C semantics throughout, then
there is no hope…
