Luca's meaningless thoughts  

I'm glad to announce that now, for the first time, CDGC means Concurrent D Garbage Collector, as I have my first (extremely raw and unoptimized) version of the concurrent GC running. And I have to say, I'm very excited and happy with the results from the very small benchmark I did.

The stop-the-world (pause) time was reduced by 2 orders of magnitude for the average, the standard deviation and, probably the more important, the maximum (these are the results for a single run, measuring the pause time for all the collections in that run). This is good news for people needing (soft) real-time in D, even when using the GC. Where the standard D GC have a pause time of 100ms, the CDGC have a pause time of 1ms.

The total run-time of the program was increased a little though, but not as much as the pause time was reduced. Only a 12% performance loss was measured, but this is just the first raw unoptimized version of the CDGC.

All this was measured with the voronoi benchmark, with -n 30000. Here are some plots:

Please note that the GC still has a global lock, so if 2 threads needs to allocate while the collection is running, both will be paused anyways (I have a couple of ideas on how to try to avoid that).

The idea about how to make the GC concurrent is based on the paper Nonintrusive Cloning Garbage Collector with Stock Operating System Support. I'm particularly excited by the results because the reduction of the pause time in the original paper were less than 1 order of magnitude better than their stop-the-world collector, so the preliminary results of the CDGC are much better than I expected.