Garbage Collection in D

Abstract:  This talk will take an in-depth look at the state of D's garbage collector. We will compare GC with other techniques, learn about recent performance improvements in D's GC, profile and tweak the GC for a specific application, see an example of manual memory management, and have an outlook on upcoming GC improvements.

D's garbage collector is notoriously known for being slow. This talk will debunk some myths about garbage collection and will provide a factual comparison of garbage collection against other memory management techniques.

We will then look at specific reasons that make D's GC slow and review how the recent improvements made it faster.

Following an introduction to the new GC profile and configure options, we will tweak a small example application and have a brief look at manual memory management.

The talk will finish with an outlook on ongoing GC improvements.

Speaker Bio: Starting off as electrical engineering student, Martin became a C++ developer working on DSP and application code at Ableton. Following 1.5 years of full-time open source he is now working as backend engineer at Mobisol. Martin is one of the main contributors to the D runtime and was recently named release manager for the D reference compiler and standard library. You can find his GitHub profile here.