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Postings from February 2001
Jan Dubois wrote: > On Mon, 12 Feb 2001 01:44:54 -0500, Dan Sugalski <dan@sidhe.org> wrote: > >Perl needs some level of tracking for objects with finalization attached to > >them. Full refcounting isn't required, however. Also, the vast majority of > >perl variables have no finalization attached to them. > > That's all fine and dandy, but it will be even slower than the current > refcounting scheme (in addition to inc/dec'ing the refcount you *also* > need to check if the current entity is being refcounted). I'm not saying > that this is necessarily a bad space/time tradeoff. But many people seem > to think that using mark-and-sweep for garbage collection will be a > performance boost. This may not be the case if objects still need to > reference counted. > > >I do wish people would get garbage collection and finalization split in > >their minds. They are two separate things which can, and will, be dealt > >with separately. > > [snip] > Of course you can combine both schemes to decouple destruction from GC, > but you then have to pay the price of both systems. If you know of a way > around this, please share! > I think having both copying-GC and refcounting-GC is a good idea. I may be saying a stupid thing, since I'm not a GC expert, but I think objects that rely on having their destructors called the soonest possible for resource cleanup could use a refcount-GC, while other objects that don't need that could use a copy-GC. I really don't know if this is really feasible, it's only an idea now. I also note that objects that are associated to resources aren't typically the ones that get shared much in Perl, so using refcount for them wouldn't be very expensive... Am I too wrong here? - BrandenThread Previous | Thread Next