Re: Memory management

["Michael O'Reilly" <michael metal iinet net au>]

Felix Bellaby <felix@pooh.u-net.com> writes:

> Michael O'Reilly writes:
>  > As any thought been given to using a conservative garbage collector or
>  > something similar? (i.e. http://reality.sgi.com/employees/boehm_mti/gc.html) 

> I do not think you will be able to sell this to C programmers.
> You can always do gnome progamming in scheme if you prefer.

Why not? I'm a C progammer, and I've love to be able to throw out all
the code that does reference tracking, and lose the possibility of
memory leaks.
 
>  > The down side of the GC is the possible 'pauses' for garbage
>  > collection, but even a 100ms pause every few mins isn't a real
>  > consideration for an interactive program.
> 
> There are garbage collection algorithms which operate by advancing 
> a few steps on each new allocation of memory.

Yes, but incremental garbage collectors normally require significant
OS/hardware support. I belive the software described in the URL above
does support generational GC, but not incremental.

> These do not result in significant pauses. However, no grabage
> collection algorithm is ever as efficient as throwing away garbage
> when you know that it is garbage.

Someone else has already pointed out that this isn't true.

Michael.