Re: Garbage collection

["Russell Y. Webb" <rw20@...>]

The issue of garbage collectors is very interesting --- there are so 
many variations and trade-offs.

Personally, I think the best (and most Lua-like) solution is to make 
the garbage collector completely modular with a published way to 
redefine it with appropriate hooks (many of which can be empty) to 
define most any scheme.  Then Lua should stick with it's current 
garbage collector in the interest of simplicity and small code size, 
while allowing a range of alternate solutions to flourish via a 
supported API (right now it's fairly modular, but that modularity is 
not supported or possible to replace without touching the source).

Of course the problem that arises will be, can efficiency and 
abstraction both be achieved in the API?  One might have to resort to a 
redefinable lua_gc_data structure (for reference counts, marks, etc) 
that is part of every object which the garbage collector defines and 
only the garbage collector knows how to look inside of, since having 
the garbage collector maintain information in separate tables is 
inefficient for some models.

Russ