From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2010-02-08T11:22:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Honest opinion needed...

On Sunday 07 February 2010 06:15:17 pm Bill Kelly wrote:
> Schala Zeal wrote:
> > The bottom line is would there be any negative impact if I were to embed
> > a Ruby 1.9.1 scripting engine in my game, in contrast to Lua?
> 
> For example, if you must maintain solid 60Hz, it can be quite a
> challenge:
> 
> As of Lua 5.1, the Garbage Collector is now incremental instead of
> mark-and-sweep.

It might be a bit heavyweight, but if your game is written in Java, JRuby 
would be a good fit. If not, you could consider embedding a Java 
interpreter... I'm pretty sure that's not a good idea, though.

Another possibility would be to implement this hack:

> Users wrote a number of addon solutions that performed
> garbage collection as pre-defined ”safe” times, such as when entering
> a city or exiting combat When incremental GC was introduced the
> system seemed to be much smoother and caused less issues for users.

Anytime you know it's safe, you could call GC.start -- I think that's what 
it's called.

Probably the best optimization -- though the least pleasant -- is to keep your 
object graph small-ish, so each GC run takes less time.