Re: garbage collection thoughts... again?!

[Thatcher Ulrich <tu@...>]

On Thu, 29 May 2003, Peter Hill wrote:
>
> One thing I think is worth specifying is the goals.
>
> For example: should the GC be completely transparent to the coder (a nice
> ideal), or is the coder required to know the process (eg: with reference
> counting the programmer can act to minimise circular references).
>
> Despite the recent non-shrinking-table oddity (the programmer having to be
> aware of implementation so that they can poke a dummy value into a table to
> free up its excess memory) I get the *impression* that Lua is designed to be
> quite high level and as independent of internal implementation methods as
> possible. If this is so then it weakens the desirabiliy of reference counts
> for Lua.

Yes, I think this is probably the best argument against ref-counting
for Lua.  One of the big advantages of ref-counting is the
predictability, which means programmers may tend to rely on its
behavior, making it impossible to change the GC implementation without
breaking programs.  Likewise ref-counting does sometimes require some
explicit management, which further ties programs to the
implementation.

-Thatcher