On Thursday, 28 February 2019 at 12:47:32 UTC, Radu wrote:
Re. the memory management section, I wonder if reference counting using dip1000 would work for memory management.
At least partly. One memory issue spasm has is to release JS objects once D code is done with them. The approach I am likely to take is to simply disallow more than 1 reference to a JS object, and then when that reference is destroyed, to also destroy the JS object. Basically a non-copyable struct with a destructor.
Over time this can be expanded with dip1000 to allow having more references to the same JS object as long as the compiler can prove it doesn't escape and has shorter lifetime.
I don't see how dip1000 can help free memory though.
You could also use the type system information for a D malloc implementation that uses free lists for known sizes. Something in line with https://github.com/JinShil/memcpyD
I saw memcpyD before. In fact I used part of the implementation in a (uncompleted) wasm port of druntime.
But again, I don't see how it would help with freeing unused objects.
It is quite interesting to see that WebAssembly lines up pretty close to bare metal programming, maybe there are some synergies here that can be exploited and create the minimum runtimes for both.
Definitely.
