From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2012-02-10T18:25:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Symbol garbage collection


On Feb 9, 2012, at 23:28 , Dido Sevilla wrote:

> I've always wondered why Ruby didn't do garbage collection of symbols,
> when Lisp implementations here and there did so, and in fact they are
> essential in macro programming because Lisp programs tend to create a
> lot of unique symbols at runtime, especially in macro code, with such
> contrivances as gensym in Scheme and Common Lisp and uniq in Arc. Once
> upon a time I studied how Ruby implemented symbols and while this
> representation made symbol garbage collection difficult, it did not by
> any means make it impossible. In addition to my work on Ruby I am also
> writing an interpreter for Arc in C, and I made it use just about the
> same representation as Ruby 1.8 did for symbols. I also devised an
> algorithm to do symbol garbage collection with that same
> representation.
> 
> http://arcueid-arc.org/2012/02/10/symbols-and-symbol-garbage-collection-arcueid-vs-ruby/
> 
> I see no reason why the same approach will not work with Ruby as well.
> 
> -- 
> 普通じゃないのが当然なら答える私は何ができる？
> 普通でも普通じゃなくて感じるまま感じることだけをするよ！
> http://stormwyrm.blogspot.com

This would be better sent to ruby-core@ or, if you speak/write japanese, even better sent to ruby-dev@