From: patrick-may@... (Patrick May)
Date: 2002-05-24T02:28:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Stymied by Ruby's garbage collector

Matthew Bloch <mattbee@soup-kitchen.net> wrote in message news:<acidug$bj0$1@paris.btinternet.com>...
> Bob Hutchison wrote:
> 
> > On 5/22/02 4:07 PM, "Art Taylor" <ataylor@fortpoint.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> Is there a particular kind or kinds of object being created in huge
> >> numbers? Can you pool those and reuse them rather than throwing them
> >> away?
> >> 
> >> -a.
> > 
> > This is the optimisation that has had the largest impact on programs I've
> > written in Eiffel, Java, and Smalltalk. These all have much fancier GC
> > systems that Ruby 1.6 and it still makes a big difference.
> 
> Sure, that does make sense but I feel it's a bit against the grain of a 
> garbage-collected language to have to alter your code to accommodate it :-) 
>  I'd rather put the same effort (in fact I intend to) into fixing Ruby's 
> garbage collection to work more smoothly.

A gc language prevents memory leaks, it makes no performance guarantees :-)

Anyway, this is similar to the Flyweight pattern on da wiki:

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?FlyweightPattern

~ Patrick