Re: Lua 5.1 (work0) -- 1st torture test

[Mark Hamburg <mhamburg@...>]

on 3/26/04 7:44 AM, Joe Myers at joe31416@procrasticon.com wrote:

> Just for fun, I tried the same script on python (v. 2.3.3), which uses
> reference counting and whose strings are immutable. Got similar results,
> except (again, untimed, just looking at the console) response degrades it
> better than lua's (as far as n=493000).

One interesting question is whether it would be productive to have a
reference counting collector backed up by an incremental mark-and-sweep
collector. I could also see, however, that getting relatively complicated to
define and the overhead might get to be too high.

Where I'm having pause concerns with the existing Lua distribution has been
while running tracking loops. Naïve implementations that generate new data
structures each time we get a mouse location will trigger the garbage
collector. These sort of data structures are prime candidates for reference
counting management (or presumably a really good generational collector).

Mark