On Wednesday, 9 March 2016 at 15:14:02 UTC, Gerald Jansen wrote:
will the large memory blocks allocated for a, b and/or c actually be scanned for pointers to GC-allocated memory during a garbage collection? If so, why?
No. It knows that the type has no pointers in it, so it will not scan it for them.
If it was a struct with a pointer, it might be scanned though. Or static arrays of int on the stack will also be scanned, since the GC doesn't actually know much about local variables - it conservatively assumes anything on the stack might be a pointer.
But large arrays are rarely on the stack so I think it is an ok situation.
See the GC block attr flags: http://dpldocs.info/experimental-docs/core.memory.GC.BlkAttr.html
