Re: Garbage collection

[James McCartney <asynth@...>]

Hello - first post. It seems there are a number of issues being solved 
currently in Lua that I've already solved, so I thought I'd give a 
reference to my source code in case it is useful.

My language SuperCollider uses a real time garbage collector based on 
the Wilson, Johnstone algorithm which is based in turn on Baker's 
treadmill algorithm. It is quite specific to my language but might be 
useful as a reference.

My language is used for real time audio synthesis control. It is like 
Smalltalk - it has classes - and constant time message lookup (not 
hashing - it uses selector based row displacement from a paper by 
Driesen and Holze IIRC). It has real honest-to-god closures and 
coroutines (that take and return arguments upon yield calls).

I would be interested in moving to a prototype based language if there 
were one available that were fast enough with a real time GC, closures 
and coroutines. So I hope Lua could move in that direction.

The language currently builds on MacOS X only.
The code can be obtained from sourceforge via: 
http://www.audiosynth.com/sc3cvs.html
(There is also code in that repository for a real time audio synthesis 
server which you might not be interested in).


--
--- james mccartney   james@audiosynth.com   <http://www.audiosynth.com>
SuperCollider - a real time synthesis programming language for the 
PowerMac.