Re: GUILE 2/3 and string encoding cost

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 10:22 AM Hans Åberg <address@hidden> wrote:

> >> Boehm GC can work in a background thread I think.  And Guile-v2
> >> applications typically just let all their data be treated as pointers
> >> rather than using a smob-marking algorithm like we do, and it is
> >> conceivable that Boehm GC's individual mark function does not scale.
> >>
> >
> > Do you mean our mechanism to call user-defined mark functions? I doubt
> that
> > there are obvious BGC scalability problems in BGC's mark functoin.
>
> The Boehm GC collects in separate threads, however, when the program is
> threaded, it puts locks around every allocation, which is very time
> consuming
>

Are you sure? Multithreaded memory management usually has per-thread
strategies to avoid contention. Locking by itself is very cheap unless
there is contention. The docs I can find are

https://www.hboehm.info/gc/scale.html

but it talks about a 500Mhz Pentium 3 as the benchmark platform, so it's
probably out of date.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen