Re: From Lua to Python?

[Coda Highland <chighland@...>]

On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 9:06 AM, Tom Cook <tom.k.cook@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Feb 2018 at 16:56 Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Lua's GC stops the world. All garbage collectors do. Lua's is just
>> reasonably well-behaved and tries to avoid big sweeps as much as
>> possible by doing smaller collections more often. It's also easier to
>> write Lua code that generates less garbage. And if you're doing
>> one-state-per-thread (the recommended way of doing it) then you're
>> only blocking one thread instead of the world.
>>
>
> I am no expert on the ins-and-outs of garbage collection, but I understand
> this is not the case - see http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaInRealTimePrograms.

That's saying the same thing I said with more precision. (Of course,
even the incremental collections have to stop the world; the idea is
to keep those as brief as possible.) The thing is, ALL garbage
collectors CAN hit pathological cases where you end up taking a long
time to clean up (the alternative is to leak memory), and Lua's is no
exception to that. The best you can do -- and Lua does a really good
job of it -- is to try to make the pathological case not come up for
typical patterns of use.

/s/ Adam