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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"Kjetil S. Matheussen" <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

Right, "interactivity" may be an important metric for some classes of
applications, albeit one that can sometimes be hard to capture.  That
said, I guess a "large fraction" of Guile users will be even more
concerned about memory consumption and execution time.

> 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.

Alright, I'll wait for bug reports.  ;-)

> Actually, I haven't used guile for other interactive stuff than
> snd. And snd is huge. It could be that the boehm gc works a lot lot
> better for really large programs than guile's gc. I'll try to run the
> gc benchmark program inside snd (with lots of scheme files loaded), it
> might give some interesting results.

Cool, let us know how it goes.

I'll probably sync my `boehm-gc' branch with HEAD one of these days, too
(I think it doesn't lack a lot of upstream changes anyway).

Thanks!

Ludovic.