Re: gc notes available

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@nada.kth.se>]

Greg Harvey <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net> writes:

> I've put my generational gc notes on my web site at
> http://home.thezone.net/~gharvey/guile/ggc-notes.txt
> 
> It's a (too long) look at most of the ideas I've come up with to
> approach implementing a gen gc for guile. Feedback & pointing out of
> really stupid ideas is welcome.

I've just downloaded the text, and I'm not sure when I'll get time to
study it for real, but there is one thing which I reacted to directly:

  1) Incremental collection. I've not given this a whole lot of thought,
     and I don't know that there's enough call for guile as a real-time
     system to make this worth the effort and performance cost.

This sounds a bit backward to me.  I think that, for many users,
incremental collection is even more important than generational GC.

In these days of multimedia, when user interfaces tends to be fancier
and fancier, real-time performance gets more and more important.

Just look at how many Java-applets which displays animations on the
net.  How is Guile going to compete with that if animations are
intermittently stopped due to GC?  (I know what I'm talking about
because I've tried to implement games in Guile. :)

I remember that this was one of the important points that people
stressed when Jim visited Japan some time ago.

Also, I'm not so sure that it has to cost a lot.

/mdj