Re: Manual Memory Management

On Jan 4, 2008 1:25 PM, Pramukta Kumar <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 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.

On the surface, this seems like a horrible idea.

You're basically yanking the object out from under any references to
it that there might be, creating, in effect dangling pointers.

The whole point of a GC, it seems to me, is to avoid this situation by
ensuring that objects are not recycled as long as they can be
referenced.

-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/