Re: Lua's GC (Was: Comparison of numbers of 3rd party libraries

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2015-05-15 18:08 GMT+02:00 zejian ju <juzejian@gmail.com>:

> You can reference to Mike Pall's GC design for LuaJIT 3.0 for more
> information:
> http://wiki.luajit.org/New-Garbage-Collector

Thank you for that link. It says inter alia:

| The garbage collector used by LuaJIT 2.0 is essentially the same as
| the Lua 5.1 GC. There are some minor refinements for write barriers
| and a couple of speed optimizations. But the basic algorithms and data
| structures are unchanged.

The page itself can be reached from <http://wiki.luajit.org/Open-Sponsorship>
which says:

| This is a list of ports, features and other work items that are planned
| for LuaJIT and are still in need of a sponsor.

In other words, that beautiful GC is at this stage still a castle in the sky.
In fact, the page explicitly warns us that it is not going to happen soon:

| Note: The main LuaJIT author (Mike Pall) is working on unrelated
| projects and cannot accept new sponsorships at this time.

In the meantime, PUC-Rio has experimented with an incrementing
garbage collector and rejected it. Maybe it is easier to design a
super-duper GC than to actually get it working better than the old one.