On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:37:03 +0100, Michel Fortin
<michel.for...@michelf.com> wrote:
On 2012-02-07 20:24:40 +0000, "Marco Leise" <marco.le...@gmx.de> said:
Am 07.02.2012, 21:11 Uhr, schrieb Nick Sabalausky <a@a.a>:
Is void initialization not good enough?
IIRC it's something like:
ubyte[] buf = void;
That gives me a) no buffer, who's pointer is b) not initialized to
null.
I want instead a defined pointer, to a valid array, that is initialized
to zero.
Anyway, I think the flaw in my proposal is the use of a GC. Since we
don't get the memory directly from the operating system, but from a
memory pool in the GC, it is generally 'recycled' and already used
memory. It has to be zeroed out manually, unless there was a way to
tell the OS to rebind some virtual memory addresses in our program to
this magic 'zero page'.
What would be nice is a GC that would just track system-allocated memory
blocks. What would be really great is if you could allocate a block with
malloc/calloc (or something else) and later pass ownership to the GC, so
that the GC calls free (or something else) when all references
disappear. But I'm not sure how you can do that efficiently.
A similar idea popped up to solve non-deterministic shared library
unloading
and/or mapped memory freeing.
I'm don't think though that putting additional pressure on the GC is the
right
approach to resource management.
The interface would be simple for non-overlapping ranges.
void GC.trackRange(void* p, size_t sz, void delegate() finalizer)
