From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-08-29T01:22:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Why Ruby Uses Mark-and-Sweep GC?

Hi,

In message "Re: Why Ruby Uses Mark-and-Sweep GC?"
    on 02/08/28, William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@z.glue.umd.edu> writes:

|In my case, the user creates certain Ruby objects with explicit commands
|and these objects exist until the end of the process, unless the user
|destroys them with explicit commands.  I store these objects in a global
|rb_ary (and therefore automatically marked).  Therefore, because I
|know when these objects are created and destroyed explicitly, I want them
|not to participate in the mark and sweep GC.  I think I just need valid
|Ruby objects (valid VALUE's) that the user can interact with, but the
|creation and deletion of these VALUE's are not under the control of Ruby
|GC.  Will creating a second "RVALUE **heaps" such as that in gc.c be a
|good idea?  (Isn't that fundamentally the object model is orthogonal to
|how the object memory is managed?)
|
|If we indeed can create VALUE's which are not under the control of Ruby
|GC, then I think we really can use Ruby in real-time programming (subject
|to certain restrictions on the user's Ruby script, of course), as the
|number of objects that need to be marked can be made much smaller (and
|therefore the marking phase will not take as much time) and be made
|relatively independent of the actual number of "Ruby objects" in the
|system (not order N anymore).

I now understand what you want.  But still, I don't think it is the
way to go for the garbage-collected languages.  This feeling is
probably due to the fact I am highly influenced from GC researchers.

							matz.