Re: a note on garbage collection

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

"Nelson H. F. Beebe" <address@hidden> writes:

> There is newly-published paper that suggests there may be a better
> alternative:
>
>       Precise Garbage Collection for C
>       Jon Rafkind, Adam Wick, John Regehr & Matthew Flatt
>       http://www.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/ismm15-rafkind.pdf

Thanks for the pointer!  It looks like an interesting piece of work.

  Magpie is a source-to-source transformation for C programs that
  enables precise garbage collection, where precise means that integers
  are not confused with pointers, and the liveness of a pointer is
  apparent at the source level.

This is a relatively intrusive approach, as opposed to how Guile can be
embedded in C apps currently.

Besides, I’m always slightly dubious regarding the misidentified pointer
rhetoric, though.

     In our experience, however, conservative GC works poorly for
  long-running programs, such as a web server, a programming
  environment, or an operating system kernel. For such programs,
  conservative GC can trigger unbounded memory use due to linked lists
  [Boehm 2002] that manage threads and continuations;

Apparently, there’s also less fatalistic experience with such
applications, e.g., Hop (http://hop.inria.fr/).

Also, [Boehm 2002] suggests ways to avoid the infamous unbounded
retention in the queue (linked-list based) example and others.

I guess the real test for us will be Guile-in-Emacs...

Thanks,
Ludo’.