Something pretty exciting happened yesterday: I registered for an independent study to build a basic garbage collector in D at my university.

This is exciting for me because I really enjoyed the work I did during the last GSoC, so I'm hoping to learn more about garbage collection and contribute to D's garbage collector more in the future.

This is especially exciting for the D community because my professor wants me to give a presentation at the end, which will expose more professors and students to this language. I don't have many details about it, but I'm hoping to have it recorded so it can be posted.

On Fri, Mar 03, 2017 at 07:00:00PM +0000, Jeremy DeHaan via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> Something pretty exciting happened yesterday: I registered for an independent study to build a basic garbage collector in D at my university.
> 
> This is exciting for me because I really enjoyed the work I did during the last GSoC, so I'm hoping to learn more about garbage collection and contribute to D's garbage collector more in the future.
> 
> This is especially exciting for the D community because my professor wants me to give a presentation at the end, which will expose more professors and students to this language. I don't have many details about it, but I'm hoping to have it recorded so it can be posted.

Awesome!


T

-- 
"I suspect the best way to deal with procrastination is to put off the procrastination itself until later. I've been meaning to try this, but haven't gotten around to it yet. " -- swr

On Friday, 3 March 2017 at 19:00:00 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
> This is exciting for me because I really enjoyed the work I did during the last GSoC, so I'm hoping to learn more about garbage collection and contribute to D's garbage collector more in the future.

What's the status of that work with respect to the D main line? Last I checked there's this https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1603 which is just hanging.

It would be great if D finally had a precise GC, though from https://wiki.dlang.org/Vision/2017H1 it would seem that @nogc has higher priority.

On Saturday, 4 March 2017 at 16:59:05 UTC, bpr wrote:
> On Friday, 3 March 2017 at 19:00:00 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
>> This is exciting for me because I really enjoyed the work I did during the last GSoC, so I'm hoping to learn more about garbage collection and contribute to D's garbage collector more in the future.
>
> What's the status of that work with respect to the D main line? Last I checked there's this https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1603 which is just hanging.


The precise GC is going to continue to hang until it can be tweaked to be as fast or faster than the conservative GC we have now.

Me working on it has effectively stalled because school takes up much of my time and I'm still pretty lacking in experience with garbage collection. That's pretty much why I'm doing the study.

On Monday, 6 March 2017 at 02:25:41 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
> Me working on it has effectively stalled because school takes up much of my time and I'm still pretty lacking in experience with garbage collection. That's pretty much why I'm doing the study.

Best of luck to you with the study then! You've chosen an interesting and difficult topic.

On Friday, 3 March 2017 at 19:00:00 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
> Something pretty exciting happened yesterday: I registered for an independent study to build a basic garbage collector in D at my university.
>
> This is exciting for me because I really enjoyed the work I did during the last GSoC, so I'm hoping to learn more about garbage collection and contribute to D's garbage collector more in the future.
>
> This is especially exciting for the D community because my professor wants me to give a presentation at the end, which will expose more professors and students to this language. I don't have many details about it, but I'm hoping to have it recorded so it can be posted.

Congratulations, and good luck.  Look forward to hearing how things go.

On Monday, 6 March 2017 at 02:25:41 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
> The precise GC is going to continue to hang until it can be tweaked to be as fast or faster than the conservative GC we have now.

In which cases?
Shouldn't this be pulled and put behind a switch? I thought D's GC was supposed to be pluggable.

This way people could actually try to use it easily and provide valuable real-world feedback and use cases. With some luck we could even get someone to contribute/improve the GC (at least for their use cases).

It doesn't have to be the default. It doesn't have to be perfect to be released as experimental.

I would probably try it if I could enable it with a simple compiler/application switch, but I'm not going to pull and build it from the source.

Sounds to me like current situation actively blocks people from contributing instead of encouraging them.