On Sunday, 5 April 2015 at 03:16:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
Things are going well with std.allocator. I broke the code into
a package with modules, which makes it quite nice to deal with.
Also I just implemented a simple heterogeneous freelist
allocator akin to the Kernighan-Ritchie one:
...
I'm envisioning a simple API that separates the
system-dependent part of the tracer (stopping all threads,
finding the roots in the globals, TLS, and stack) from what the
collector is supposed to proceed with the tracing.
So I'm thinking e.g. of a range that would iterate through all
untyped words on all stacks as void* data.
foreach (void* p; GC.traceAllStacks)
{
...
}
Then we'd have typed data in TLS and globals. I guess those
would come as ranges of Tuple!(void[], Typeinfo) or something
similar
I cannot think of much I can do to help - I just started reading
the GC code on the ferry over - but this is very cool.
Intrinsically, and because it addresses a perception that is an
impediment to adoption (even though I reckon people make a lazy
mental association of GC with problems associated with Java in
its early days when it actually might not be a real barrier for
many of them with D today in their actual use case - just like
the spurious 'D has two standard libraries' meme).
Only one suggestion - I know there are some GC benchmarks in
Phobos/Druntime. Might it be an idea to relate these to some of
the standard benchmarks people use to evaluate GC in other
languages, so people have clarity on the tradeoffs. We don't
need to make these salient until the time is right.
