Re: garbage collection thoughts... again?!

[Mark Hamburg <mhamburg@...>]

I agree with the suggestion that a detailed discussion of this is more
appropriate for the GC list. Having chimed in once, however, I'll finish off
my earlier comments by sinning again.

I just went and skimmed Jones & Lins on reference counting. My reaction is
that an implementation of deferred reference counting -- i.e., no counting
references from the stack and use a periodically reconciled zero-count table
-- backed up by a basic mark-and-sweep algorithm could be a good alternative
to incremental garbage collection for Lua provided that cycles are either
rare enough or are mostly confined to long-lasting data structures (i.e, if
one can assume that the objects in cyclic structures probably aren't garbage
anyway).

Mark