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Re: speed and consing (Re: DHARMI project)


> Andrew  - aarchiba@csclub.uwaterloo.ca - wrote:
> 
> > Maybe at some point a sufficiently brilliant person will read a bunch
> > of research papers and implement a thread-safe generational
> > mostly-copying partially-conservative background garbage collector for
> > Guile. Well, we can dream, anyway.
> 
> There is an OS-level thread-safe conservative mostly-parallel garbage
> collector for C that one might be able to drop in.  Porbably not, if
> guile does bit-fiddling on pointers... but it might be worth looking
> at.  Boehm's GC... http://reality.sgi.com/employees/boehm_mti/gc.html.

The Boehm-Weiser GC is nice, but there are some objections to using it in
guile:

- highly OS-dependant
- license
- speed (guile's GC is faster then the BW-GC)
- problematic when interfacing with libs not using the proper allocation
  functions 

But it is a very interesting mathod to add gargabe collection to any C/C++
programm.

-- 
                     Wolfgang Kechel
                  Email: wolfgang@prs.de
  Patzschke + Rasp GmbH   Bierstadter Str. 7  D-65189 Wiesbaden
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