Am 09.10.2013 07:15, schrieb Manu:
I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of experts, plenty of conversations at dconf, and nobody could even offer me a vision for a GC that is acceptable. As far as I can tell, nobody I talked to really thinks a GC that doesn't stop the world, which can be carefully scheduled/time-sliced (ie, an incremental, thread-local GC, or whatever), is even possible.
I have to fully agree here. I recently bought and read the book "The handbook of garbage collection". And the base requirement they make for basically every garbage collector that is a little bit more advancted then a impercise mark & sweep is that you know the _exact_ location of _all_ your pointers. And thats where D's problems come from. Its quite easy to know all pointers on the heap but the real problem are the pointers on the stack. If we really want a state of the art GC we need fully working pointer discovery first.
Regarding the GC D's biggest problem is, that it was designed to require a GC but it was not designed to actually support a GC.
And thats why I don't believe that there will ever be a GC good enough in D to fullfill realtime or soft-realtime requirements.
Kind Regards Benjamin Thaut
