Started learning D. Like the language. However, found several
people complaining about garbage collector’s reliability and
performance. For me it’s a showstopper.
I don’t believe a community is capable of creating a good GC.
It’s just too complex engineering task. It’s been a known problem
for years, still no solution.
Since recently, Microsoft’s .NET framework and runtime are open
source under MIT license. Here’s the main parts of their GC:
https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/tree/master/src/gc As you see,
it’s in C++, and contains 10-20 times more code, then D’s GC.
Theoretically, it should be cross-platform: there’re build
instructions for Linux (including ARM), OSX, and BSD; but I
haven’t tried building on those.
Has anyone thought about taking GC from .NET and reusing it in D?
That GC is very efficient for wide range of applications. I’ve
been using .NET since 3.0 on desktops, servers, embedded and
mobiles, never had issues with GC, it just works, and the
performance is good.
I don‘t know architectural details of either GC.
I perfectly aware it might happen so they are completely
incompatible, or very hard to port: because .NET’s System.Object
vs. D’s Object differences; because D’s fibers or just very
different threading model; because different CRT; many other
reasons possible.
But if we’re lucky, this GC could lead to a great improvement for
D ecosystem, not costing too much time. IMO that is something
doable by a single person in a spare time.
Thoughts?
