On Mon, 03 Feb 2014 12:40:20 -0800, Dmitry Olshansky <dmitry.olsh@gmail.com> wrote:

04-Feb-2014 00:21, Adam Wilson пишет:

On Mon, 03 Feb 2014 12:02:29 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:

On 2/3/14, 6:57 AM, Frank Bauer wrote:

Anyone asking for the addition of ARC or owning pointers to D, gets
pretty much ignored. The topic is "Smart pointers instead of GC?",
remember? People here seem to be more interested in diverting to
nullable, scope and GC optimization. Telling, indeed.

I thought I made it clear that GC avoidance (which includes
considering built-in reference counting) is a major focus of 2014.

Andrei

...

Sadly, although written as hyperbole, I feel that the above is fairly
close to the actual position of the ARC crowd.

I won't be surprised that half of current GC problems are because it's simply too stupid as an allocator. I had some numbers that I'd need to dig up were GC.malloc was ~2x slower then malloc even with garbage collection disabled.

With that said I'd focus on ref-counting somehow coexisting with tracing GC. It doesn't go well at the moment - try creating dynamic arrays of std.stdio.File (that is ref-counted).

I will not defend the current GC, it is about as stupid as you can make one and still have a functioning memory management system. It implements exactly none of the optimizations recommended for Mark-Sweep GC's in the GC Handbook.

That said, I firmly believe that wholesale replacement of the GC is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Effectively, the poor D GC implementation has become an excuse to launch a crusade against all GC's everywhere, never mind that Java and the .NET GC's are consistent examples of just how good GC's can actually be.