On 2011-12-19 00:19, Adam Wilson wrote:
On Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:02:17 -0800, Timon Gehr <timon.g...@gmx.ch> wrote:
On 12/18/2011 11:53 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Sunday, 18 December 2011 at 20:32:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
That is an interesting opportunity. At any rate, I am 100% convinced
precise GC is the only way to go, and I think I've convinced Walter to
a good extent as well.
Sacrificing something (performance, executable size) for something else
is not an unilateral improvement.
It is an unilateral improvement if both options are kept open. I don't
see a reason to cease support for the current GC model.
Furthermore, a generational GC performs much better than a simple
mark-sweep GC.
It seems to that we are really dancing around the potential solution. A
pluggable GC interface that allowed the developer to choose the right GC
for the task, or no GC at all. Imagine if all the developer had to do is
set a compiler switch and the compiler automatically linked in the
correct GC for the job. D could ship with a default GC then others could
write different GC's based on different paradigms or their own needs. It
would be a piece of work to get the interfaces right, but definitely
worth it in the long run.
Theoretically this would also give the developer the ability to link in
multiple collectors and switch between them during program execution,
provided the working set data was stored in a common format; although I
have never heard of a use case for such a capability. I imagine that it
could be useful if your application needs a low power state and you
wanted to use a more power-efficient GC over a more precise one. I'm
just theorizing here though. I'm sure their are technical snags that
would prevent this from happening.
I think supporting a NoGC environment is a good idea in the long run as
their are cases to be made for manual memory management, but it also
shouldn't be our first goal. GC's are were the value is.
It's already possible to plug different GC's at link time.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
