• Sean Kelly <sean invisibleduck.org> Nov 20 2009

Sean Kelly <sean invisibleduck.org> writes:

dsimcha Wrote:
 
 Yes, and similarly, when I write code to do some complicated processing of gene
 expression data or DNA sequences, and it uses RAM measured in gigabytes, I go
to
 similar lengths to avoid GC for similar reasons.  (That and false pointers.) 
It's
 not unique to server space.  The reason I still use D instead of C or C++ is
 because, even if I'm using every hack known to man to avoid GC, it's still got
 insane metaprogramming capabilities, and it's still what std.range and
 std.algorithm are written in.


In our case, we're running on machines with 64 GB or more of physical RAM, and
using all of it.  I think we could get away with GC for certain processing
where it's convenient so long as we had per-thread GCs and used malloc/free for
the bulk of our data (feasible, since most everything has a deterministic
lifetime).  D seems like a great language in this respect, since it doesn't
require GC use for every allocation.