Manual Memory Management

I was thinking it would be nice to be able to free large objects at  
will without making ruby go through the full garbage collection  
process each time.  Basically to have the ability to optionally manage  
your own memory (kindof).  I tried adding this singleton method to the  
GC module as a test:

in gc.c:
static VALUE rb_obj_free(VALUE self, VALUE obj) {
	obj_free(obj);
	rb_gc_force_recycle(obj);
	return Qnil;
}

and exposing it as GC.free(obj) in the init function

It seems to actually work (except when you try and free a nil  
object).  I'm no expert on ruby internals though so I'm worried that  
i'm actually creating a severe problem by doing this.  Does anyone  
here know?  If this (or something similar) does work it seems like a  
really cool feature to add.  I've attached a patchfile.
~mookie