TypeInfo, static data and the GC
by Leandro Lucarella on 2010- 08- 16 00:39 (updated on 2010- 08- 16 00:39)- with 0 comment(s)
The D compiler doesn't provide any information on the static data that the GC must scan, so the runtime/GC have to use OS-dependant tricks to get that information.
Right now, in Linux, the GC gets the static data to scan from the libc's variables __data_start and _end, from which are not much information floating around except for some e-mail from Hans Boehm to the binutils mainling list.
There is a lot of stuff in the static data that doesn't need to be scanned, most notably the TypeInfo, which is a great portion of the static data. C libraries static data, for example, would be scanned too, when it makes no sense to do so.
I noticed CDGC has more than double the static data the basic GC has, just because of TypeInfo (I use about 5 or so more types, one of them is a template, which makes the bloat bigger).
The voronoi test goes from 21KB to 26KB of static data when using CDGC.
It would be nice if the compiler could group all the static that must really be scanned (programs static variables) together and make its limits available to the GC. It would be even nicer to leave static variables that have no pointers out of that group, and even much more nicer to create a pointer map like the one in the patch for precise scanning to allow precise heap scanning. Then only the scan should be scanned in full conservative mode.
I reported a bug with this issue so it doesn't get lost.