What does HackerNews think of bdwgc?

By that logic, projects like the Bohem GC is dead with only one full time maintainer.

https://github.com/ivmai/bdwgc

Boehm GC is mentioned in the article: https://github.com/ivmai/bdwgc

Unity uses/used the standard boehm garbage collector [1] for over a decade, and it has been notorious for causing GC lag in games produced from that engine, noticeable in occasional sudden spikes of dropped framerate while the GC does a sweep at a layer of abstraction higher than Unity game developers can control directly.

People went to extreme measures to avoid allocating memory in their games: manually pooling every in-game object & particle, not using string comparisons in C#, etc https://danielilett.com/2019-08-05-unity-tips-1-garbage-coll...

Unity itself finally has a new system they're previewing to average out the GC spikes over time, so a game, say, never drops below 60fps: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/26/feature-preview-increme...

As well, there is a new way of writing C# code for Unity called ECS that will avoid producing GC sweeps https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/[email protected]/man...

[1[ https://github.com/ivmai/bdwgc

They put up their editor source code on Github recently (https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference), and originally it also included the full source to their runtime garbage collector, which ended up being the standard open source C++ boehm collector (https://github.com/ivmai/bdwgc) from the 90s.

Unity should replace it with a reference counting object management system, or update to a newer garbage collection technique to minimize the inadvertent sweeps that cause huge choppy frame rate drops.

Crystal uses Boehm GC https://github.com/ivmai/bdwgc

The typical way of doing garbage collection in C++ is via reference counting. This is the strategy used in the library by default.

However, this can be customized in the library. There is a brief description here: https://sinusoid.es/immer/memory.html

For example, one may choose between thread safe or thread unsafe reference counting (the later is much faster!). One may also plug in a conservative garbage collector, like `libgc` (https://github.com/ivmai/bdwgc). While reference counting is often considered to be bad for immutable data structures, I found out that this is not the case. They have very interesting interactions with move semantics and _transients_ (this is a feature that is still on the design phase though). I should write more about this somewhere, maybe in a blog or even as a paper.