Re: Lua 5.1 (work5) now available

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> Was the generational collector deemed too difficult to make worth the
> effort?

The cost/benefit ratio was too high. The iteraction between the
generational and the incremental collectors had several side effects (it
was hard to control) and the performance gains seem almost nil.

Since the beginning, the generational collector was a kind of a hack.
We tried to use the same machinery of the incremental collector to avoid
too much extra code. For some not yet fully understood reasons, its
behavior was far from what we expected from a real generational collector.

As the incremental collector seems to work fine and with a reasonable
performance without this generational part, and as the incremental
collector was what people really needed, we decided not to invest more
time in the generational collector for now.

-- Roberto