Explicitly triggering the Garbage Collector

[Uli Kusterer <witness.of.teachtext@...>]

Hi, it's me again.

 I've found luaC_collectgarbage() in lgc.h for explicitly triggering  
the garbage collector. However, if I understand this correctly, we're  
only supposed to use the "public" Lua API, i.e. the stuff in lua.h  
and lualib.h (and lauxlib.h). Is it okay to use this GC call, or am I  
asking for trouble and making it harder to update to future versions  
of Lua?

 Since my app has several distinct phases, and thus certain clear  
breaks at which I *know* there will be lots of objects in need of  
being reclaimed, I'd like to be able to explicitly trigger the GC.  
People will be waiting between these phases anyway, and thus won't  
notice the time the GC could take. This function seems to work, but  
since it's not part of the public API, I fear I may have overlooked  
some more obvious means of achieving the same. Any clues will be  
appreciated.

Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
http://www.zathras.de