On 4/8/16 11:08 AM, Jonathan Villa wrote:
On Thursday, 7 April 2016 at 16:13:59 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
On 4/6/16 3:54 PM, Jonathan Villa wrote:
You are likely running into the GC being conservative. You are also
possibly running into an issue where you are expecting the compiler to
do something with the stack where it may do something else. A classic
question that is asked on D forums all the time is why when you null
some variable and then call GC collect, the memory isn't collected.
The answer is because quite possibly the value is still in a register,
and the registers must be scanned too.
As for conservatism, if you generate a 1-million element array of
pointers (each element has a pointer in it), then you have some random
stack variable that "happens" to point into that giant array (more
likely in 32-bit systems), then both the array, and all it's pointing
at gets saved.
Good, I compiled the program in 64 bit mode (-m64) and now it release
memory normally like in Debian.
Definitely, 64-bit is less likely to randomly point at memory. This
isn't 100% sure-fire way to fix the problem though.
I would like to know where can I learn more about the 'register' or the
GC for the D so I can avoid future issues.
Your best bet is to free the memory itself if it's possible.
import core.memory: GC;
GC.free(combs.ptr);
For more info on how GC works: dlang.org/spec/garbage.html
-Steve
