Luca's meaningless thoughts  

Here are some details on how to try CDGC, as it needs a very particular setup, specially due to DMD not having precise heap scanning integrated yet.

Here are the steps (in some kind of literate scripting, you can copy&paste to a console ;)

# You probably want to do all this mess in some subdirectory :)
mkdir cdgc-test
cd cdgc-test

# First, checkout the repositories.
git clone git://git.llucax.com/software/dgc/cdgc.git
# If you have problems with git:// URLs, try HTTP:
# git clone https://git.llucax.com/r/software/dgc/cdgc.git
svn co http://svn.dsource.org/projects/tango/tags/releases/0.99.9 tango

# DMD doesn't care much (as usual) about tags, so you have to use -r to
# checkout the 1.063 revision (you might be good with the latest revision
# too).
svn co -r613 http://svn.dsource.org/projects/dmd/branches/dmd-1.x dmd

# Now we have to do some patching, let's start with Tango (only patch 3 is
# *really* necessary, but the others won't hurt).
cd tango
for p in 0001-Fixes-to-be-able-to-parse-the-code-with-Dil.patch \
         0002-Use-the-mutexattr-when-initializing-the-mutex.patch \
         0003-Add-precise-heap-scanning-support.patch \
         0004-Use-the-right-attributes-when-appending-to-an-empty-.patch
do
   wget -O- "https://llucax.com/blog/posts/2010/10/10-trying-cdgc-howto/$p" |
         patch -p1
done
cd ..

# Now let's go to DMD
cd dmd
p=0001-Create-pointer-map-bitmask-to-allow-precise-heap-sca.patch
wget -O- "https://llucax.com/blog/posts/2010/10/10-trying-cdgc-howto/$p" |
      patch -p1

# Since we are in the DMD repo, let's compile it (you may want to add -jN if
# you have N CPUs to speed up things a little).
make -C src -f linux.mak
cd ..

# Good, now we have to wire Tango and CDGC together, just create a symbolic
# link:
cd tango
ln -s ../../../../../cdgc/rt/gc/cdgc tango/core/rt/gc/

# Since I don't know very well the Tango build system, I did a Makefile of my
# own to compile it, so just grab it and compile Tango with it. It will use
# the DMD you just compiled and will compile CDGC by default (you can change
# it via the GC Make variable, for example: make GC=basic to compile Tango
# with the basic GC). The library will be written to obj/libtango-$GC.a, so
# you can have both CDGB and the basic collector easily at hand):
wget https://llucax.com/blog/posts/2010/10/10-trying-cdgc-howto/Makefile
make # Again add -jN if you have N CPUs to make a little faster

# Now all you need now is a decent dmd.conf to put it all together:
cd ..
echo "[Environment]" > dmd/src/dmd.conf
echo -n "DFLAGS=-I$PWD/tango -L-L$PWD/tango/obj " >> dmd/src/dmd.conf
echo -n "-defaultlib=tango-cdgc " >> dmd/src/dmd.conf
echo "-debuglib=tango-cdgc -version=Tango" >> dmd/src/dmd.conf

# Finally, try a Hello World:
cat <<EOT > hello.d
import  tango.io.Console;

void main()
{
   Cout("Hello, World").newline;
}
EOT
dmd/src/dmd -run hello.d

# If you don't trust me and you want to be completely sure you have CDGC
# running, try the collect_stats_file option to generate a log of the
# collections:
D_GC_OPTS=collect_stats_file=log dmd/src/dmd -run hello.d
cat log

Done!

If you want to make this DMD the default, just add dmd/src to the PATH environment variable or do a proper installation ;)

Let me know if you hit any problem...