Patch to make D's GC partially precise
by Leandro Lucarella on 2009- 11- 06 14:43 (updated on 2009- 11- 06 23:09)- with 0 comment(s)
David Simcha has announced a couple of weeks ago that he wanted to work on making the D's GC partially precise (only the heap). I was planning to do it myself eventually because it looked like something doable with not much work that could yield a big performance gain, and particularly useful to avoid memory leaks due to false pointers (which can keep huge blocks of data artificially alive). But I didn't had the time and I had other priorities.
Anyway, after some discussion, he finally announced he got the patch, which he added as a bug report. The patch is being analyzed for inclusion, but the main problem now is that it is not integrated with the new operator, so if you want to get precise heap scanning, you have to use a custom function to allocate (that creates a map of the type to allocate at compile-time to pass the information about the location of the pointers to the GC).
I'm glad David could work on this and I hope this can be included in D2, since is a long awaited feature of the GC.
Update
David Schima has been just added to the list of Phobos developers. Maybe he can integrate his work on associative arrays too.