Re: Nil-ing userdata

[David Pirrò <david.pirro@...>]

You're right
Now I got it.
Thank you for clarification.

Bests,

David

Il giorno 23/ott/2010, alle ore 14.33, Drake Wilson ha scritto:

> Quoth David Pirrò <david.pirro@gmail.com>, on 2010-10-23 14:22:27 +0200:
>> Is there a possibility to "force" the garbage collection?
> 
> No.  Why do you need to do this?  Overwrite the contents of the
> userdata with a recognizable invalid state, then make further
> operations on it fail (and any finalizer do nothing instead).  If you
> have a giant piece of memory that you need to free immediately or
> something, make the userdata only contain a pointer there, and then
> free the memory yourself in the dispose operation.
> 
> Think about what you're describing: you're asking for every reference
> from anywhere in the heap to suddenly become something else.  It's not
> impossible to design a GC scheme that allows this, but it tends to be
> either very expensive (scanning the entire heap) or pretty complicated
> and not as useful as you think (using forwarding pointers).
> 
>> David
> 
>   ---> Drake Wilson
>