From: "Mauricio Fernández" Date: 2003-07-22T17:40:09+09:00 Subject: Re: matz thoughts on Rite ? On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 05:11:42PM +0900, George Marrows wrote: > Chris Thomas wrote in message news:... > > > There's been talk about a generational garbage collector customized for > > Ruby in the past. Boehm is mostly a conservative mark&sweep, IIRC. In > > any case, it should be possible to do better than Boehm, which largely > > lives within the restraints imposed by supporting C and C++. > > Ruby's extension & embedding API means that its GC also needs to > support C (and C++) - I think it has the same constraints as Boehm. Ruby's current GC is not "general purpose" as Boehm: it only looks in the stack for VALUEs, not for arbitrary pointers (it doesn't have to verify if there's anything pointing to somewhere inside a memory block). Extensions still allocate memory using malloc(), Ruby doesn't mess with that; ie. Ruby manages no memory arenas, only VALUE heaps. If an extension malloc()s memory and doesn't free it later Ruby won't know about it. > Any non-conservative GC scheme for Ruby would surely complicate the > API and the implementation. matz already stated the GC will be generational and conservative. -- _ _ | |__ __ _| |_ ___ _ __ ___ __ _ _ __ | '_ \ / _` | __/ __| '_ ` _ \ / _` | '_ \ | |_) | (_| | |_\__ \ | | | | | (_| | | | | |_.__/ \__,_|\__|___/_| |_| |_|\__,_|_| |_| Running Debian GNU/Linux Sid (unstable) batsman dot geo at yahoo dot com MS-DOS, you can't live with it, you can live without it. -- from Lars Wirzenius' .sig