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Postings from July 2000
Re: perl 6 requirements
From:
Graham Barr
Date:
July 31, 2000 05:39
Subject:
Re: perl 6 requirements
Message ID:
20000731133502.S8717@pobox.com
On Mon, Jul 31, 2000 at 01:28:05PM +0100, Alan Burlison wrote:
> The trouble with all automated garbage collection schemes is that they
> tend to be non-deterministic. Having your program grind to a halt at
> irregular intervals is not a good thing. What about some sort of
> hybrid, using reference counting as the first and default way of
> reclaiming memory, with a full GC pass at selectable points, e.g. never,
> every n seconds, whenever a block bigger than a given size is allocated,
> at interpreter instance exit, on demand etc. The existing refcount
> mechamism has worked well, and has predictable behaviour. It seems a
> shame to throw it out in favour of something that in most cases probably
> won't work as well.
This was a hot topic during Chips talk at TPC and I am sure it will get
a lot of discussion on the internals mailing list whenever it is setup.
Please don't fill this list with a discussion on the merits/flaws of
various GC algorithms.
Thanks,
Graham.