On Thursday, 21 December 2017 at 11:08:23 UTC, thedeemon wrote:
A good GC requires the compiler to add special bookkeeping code to every pointer mutation in the heap, and to generate special data for each function to help GC find all the pointers in its stack and closures. Without such help from the compiler you can't make anything decent, just a slow half-conservative GC that scans whole heap every time and leaks memory being unable to tell whether some stack value is a number or a pointer. Go compiler includes that special bookkeeping, so the running code is a bit slower but GC can be fast, its GC can analyze heap concurrently, it can clean it by parts. With C you can't do that. D compiler also doesn't insert that bookkeeping code, so running code is fast as C but GC is slow and sloppy.
But for D it's planned to rewrite the GC to become something like the Go GC right? The last attempt to do this was afaik a Google Summer of code project.
