Re: Experience with guile + Boehm GC in SND (Re: New versions of rt-compiler.scm, rt-examples.scm and rt.tex

[Kjetil S. Matheussen]

On Mon, 4 Jun 2007, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Kjetil Svalastog Matheussen <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > [2] tla my-default-archive address@hidden
> >     tla get guile-core--boehm-gc
>
> So that's the one you've been using and referring to as "Guile + Boehm
> GC"?  Glad to hear it!  ;-)

Sorry I didn't write that in my first mail.



> Did you make sure to compile libgc "the right way", so that locking in
> with a multi-threaded libgc doesn't hurt performance[0]?

I have tried with and without both --enable-threads=posix 
and --enable-parallel-mark. No difference, it seems to work perfectly 
anyway.



> The main thing that needs to be done before we can consider this
> solution now is to compare both memory usage _and_ execution time of the
> two Guiles.

Yes, but for some kinds of software, like programs with custom gui's, 
sound processing programs, interactive graphical programs, interactivety 
is exclusively more important than those two. I consider the freeze that 
the guile's built-in gc cause to be its biggest problem.

In fact, I don't think execution time is an important factor here at all. 
Don't get me wrong, of course execution time is important in general, but 
a change in execution time of a gc benchmark program within the factor of 
two sounds like an insignificant difference compared to what is gained in 
interactivity.



>  For instance, with the default settings, Guile + Boehm GC is slightly 
> faster than Guile when running `gcbench.scm', but it might consume more 
> memory.  This needs to be analyzed.  Reports as to how this impacts SND 
> are also more than welcome, of course!  ;-)

I'm going to run Guile + Boehm GC + SND for a while now and report back if 
anything unusual happens. I might even release a special version of SND 
with guile + the Boehm GC included to the public in the near future, 
because of the huge advantages it has. This might generate a lot of 
feedback. And if no one reports back, then its a good sign that it works 
well.