Re: Garbage collection

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

On Wednesday, October 30, 2002, at 07:13 AM, Steve Dekorte wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 29, 2002, at 09:22 AM, Russell Y. Webb wrote:
> > 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.
>
> That might not be possible as some collectors require write and/or 
> read barriers(you need to tell them when a reference is added or 
> read). Putting in these barriers and leaving hooks to them would cost 
> too much in overhead. You could avoid the unused hook overhead with 
> defines, but still, you'd add a lot of complexity to the C bindings 
> that likely wouldn't be used.

It's true that you might wind up with too many hooks for it to look 
clean.  You could leave it up to your compiler to optimize away calls 
to empty function --- compilers are good at that these days.

It would be interesting to see a list of hooks that would support mark 
and sweep, generational mark and sweep, incremental versions, and 
reference counting.  Something like
	gc_init
	gc_cleanup
	gc_ref
	gc_unref
	gc_write
	gc_read
	gc_begin_collection
	gc_continue_collection
	gc_end_collection

Russ