Re: [gtk-list] Re: Reference counting

[Rob Browning <rlb cs utexas edu>]

"G. Sumner Hayes" <sumner@collegium.adsl.net.cmu.edu> writes:

> Also, despite appearances ref counting is often slower in total time
> usage than mark-and-sweep.  On the other hand, individual latencies are
> lower than naive mark-sweep and that is sometimes much more important,
> depending on the application.  Incremental mark-sweep gives the best of
> both worlds.  (copy-collect is probably not suitable for GTK as there
> may be extremely large GC'd objects)

Sorry to post to this thread after so long, but I just now got around
to reading it.  I just wanted to point out that there's also
"real-time" incremental garbage collection which might be good for
something like GTK where the app needs to always be responsive.
There's a free implementation of such a beast at:

  http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/oops/

This implementation relies on a C++ "smart pointer" interface, but
could quite possibly be adapted to C.  I haven't checked.

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>
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