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D Programming Language 2.0


Last update Sun Dec 30 20:21:55 2012

Garbage Collection

D is a fully garbage collected language. That means that it is never necessary to free memory. Just allocate as needed, and the garbage collector will periodically return all unused memory to the pool of available memory.

C and C++ programmers accustomed to explicitly managing memory allocation and deallocation will likely be skeptical of the benefits and efficacy of garbage collection. Experience both with new projects written with garbage collection in mind, and converting existing projects to garbage collection shows that:

Garbage collection is not a panacea. There are some downsides:

These constraints are addressed by techniques outlined in Memory Management.

How Garbage Collection Works

The GC works by:

  1. Looking for all the pointer ‘roots’ into GC allocated memory.
  2. Recursively scanning all allocated memory pointed to by roots looking for more pointers into GC allocated memory.
  3. Freeing all GC allocated memory that has no active pointers to it.
  4. Possibly compacting the remaining used memory by copying the allocated objects (called a copying collector).

Interfacing Garbage Collected Objects With Foreign Code

The garbage collector looks for roots in:

  1. its static data segment
  2. the stacks and register contents of each thread
  3. any roots added by std.gc.addRoot() or std.gc.addRange()

If the only root of an object is held outside of this, then the collecter will miss it and free the memory.

To avoid this from happening,

Pointers and the Garbage Collector

Pointers in D can be broadly divided into two categories: those that point to garbage collected memory, and those that do not. Examples of the latter are pointers created by calls to C's malloc(), pointers received from C library routines, pointers to static data, pointers to objects on the stack, etc. For those pointers, anything that is legal in C can be done with them.

For garbage collected pointers and references, however, there are some restrictions. These restrictions are minor, but they are intended to enable the maximum flexibility in garbage collector design.

Undefined behavior:

Things that are reliable and can be done:

One can avoid using pointers anyway for most tasks. D provides features rendering most explicit pointer uses obsolete, such as reference objects, dynamic arrays, and garbage collection. Pointers are provided in order to interface successfully with C APIs and for some low level work.

Working with the Garbage Collector

Garbage collection doesn't solve every memory deallocation problem. For example, if a root to a large data structure is kept, the garbage collector cannot reclaim it, even if it is never referred to again. To eliminate this problem, it is good practice to set a reference or pointer to an object to null when no longer needed.

This advice applies only to static references or references embedded inside other objects. There is not much point for such stored on the stack to be nulled, since the collector doesn't scan for roots past the top of the stack, and because new stack frames are initialized anyway.

Object Pinning and a Moving Garbage Collector

Although D does not currently use a moving garbage collector, by following the rules listed above one can be implemented. No special action is required to pin objects. A moving collector will only move objects for which there are no ambiguous references, and for which it can update those references. All other objects will be automatically pinned.

D Operations That Involve the Garbage Collector

Some sections of code may need to avoid using the garbage collector. The following constructs may allocate memory using the garbage collector:

References





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