On 9/20/14, 9:31 AM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
On Saturday, 20 September 2014 at 16:15:45 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
We need to explore that. A possibility is to support coexistence and
then have the option to use a tool statically pinpoint the uses of GC.
-- Andrei
What, *exactly*, does "uses of GC" mean? In other words, what
specifically makes GC.malloc evil that must be avoided at any cost while
C malloc (+ GC.addRange most likely) is an acceptable replacement?
A few things that come to mind are:
1) Obviously, GC.malloc can trigger a collection. But this can be easily
disabled.
2) The GC lock? I don't know how malloc handles this though.
3) Is GC.free substantially different than C's free?
4) Programmers don't typically explicitly free GC memory... but we could.
5) Bookkeeping overhead? I know malloc has some too though, is this
really a dealbreaker?
6) Public relations.
....that's all I can think of. What am I missing? Which one of these is
actually causing the problem that we're supposed to be fixing here?
The only problem is that GC.malloc doesn't need to be paired by a call
to GC.free, whereas malloc must.
Andrei
