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Re: garbage collectors


   Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 15:41:02 -0500
   From: Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>
   Cc: Guile List <guile@cygnus.com>
   References: <lbiutsuo8r.fsf@boron.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp>


   Aubrey Jaffer says he has used SCM for very long-running computations
   without any problems.  He does (I think) circuit simulations with it.
   Guile's GC is identical in principle to SCM's.

   In theory, yes, conservative GC can cause an unbounded amount of
   garbage to be retained.  In practice, we haven't seen this as a
   problem.  We've found storage leaks in Guile, but they have never been
   the GC's fault --- just the humans, as usual.

See our paper: 

	ftp://ftp.di.unipi.it/pub/Papers/attardi/SPE.ps.gz

for some performance measurements of Boehm collector and CMM collector.
In an application of computer algebra, Boehm collector becomes instable:
the way to fix it is either to disable interior pointer recognition or
to supply information about the presence of pointers in objects,
for instance using GC_malloc_atomic().

-- Beppe