Re: Gnome 2.14 Module Proposal: Deskbar Applet

[Mike Hearn <mike plan99 net>]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 19:16:20 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> That could be worse! Compacting GC's require twice the memory of a
> non-compacting one. (you dont know how much garbage you have when you walk
> the heap to GC so you need another empty heap of the same size to copy
> everything into it)

Yes, I know, but it's only temporary. After that the other "side" of the
heap can be unmapped in one go. Anyway, I think everybody knows GC is not
a magic solution, but for a language like Python it seems you really do
need at least some way to compress heap usage to a minimum and compacting
GC does this quite well.
 
> Mono and most other GC languages (gcj/java et al) also suffer from
> memory leaks due to the boehm GC not being precise enough. 

The MS.NET GC is precise and does not leak. Given that Boehm GC can be
given type info for where pointers are I don't see any reason why it
*must* be this way, just that maybe Boehm GC isn't the right library for
Mono yet.

> The right solution is to not use a GC langugae for these kinds of apps
> (unless they offer manual freeing of objects in addition to GC which the
> boehm GC supports).

Well, it's definitely true that many GCd platforms have quite poor
performance unless you have tons of memory, but on the other hand we have
to move on some time :)

Anyway. I don't think this problem can be easily be solved, it's more
important that people are aware of it and take it into consideration when
using Python.

thanks -mike