From: Erik Scheirer <e@...>
Date: 2010-01-11T23:42:29+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:27534] Re: better GC?

I think a pluggable/loadable GC scheme, as long as its really simple to use, is perfect. 

There would be some overhead created by making it pluggable, though, but in the scheme of things it would be well worth the small amount of cpu cycles lost.

Just my two-cents-worth ...

e

On Jan 11, 2010, at 9:32 AM, Paul Brannan wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 07:37:40AM +0900, Kurt Stephens wrote:
>> I'm not convinced that the GC is the issue, but I haven't really been 
>> measuring it in production environments.   I think common code or Ruby 
>> semantics that create avoidable garbage is the issue and would be an issue 
>> regardless of GC technology, including reference counting.
> 
> Avoiding garbage doesn't solve the problem; if there is a large number
> of reachable objects, the mark phase can still take a long time.  This
> is why a number of people want a generational collector, because it can
> reduce the amount of time spent marking objects.
> 
> IMO it's clear that there is no one-size-fits all option.  I wonder how
> difficult it would be to make the GC pluggable, so alternate GC's could
> be provided as gems?
> 
> (obviously there would still be limitations on these GC's; an
> incremental collector would probably be out of the question).
> 
> Paul
> 
> 
>