Re: gc notes available

[Greg Harvey <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net>]

Klaus Schilling <Klaus.Schilling@home.ivm.de> writes:

> Jim Blandy writes:
>  > 
>  > I'm concerned first with reducing the overall cost of GC, and second
>  > with providing acceptable interactive behavior.
>  > 
>  > I have read that most incremental collectors limit the absolute pause
>  > length, but consume more time overall than non-incremental collectors.
>  > I don't want to come out of this with Guile spending *more* time in
>  > the collector than it does now.  I'm not interested enough in games
>  > and animations to make that trade.
>  
> My game is downright discrete in time and space, so the conservative gc 
> behaves quite well for this special game. (just take a cup of camilla tea in 
> the gc breaks)
> 
> What would be typical apps, games or serious, where both the expressive power 
> of scheme scripting and the realtime animated pixel stuff are actually needed?

For games, there are a lot of things you could possibly want to
delegate to scheme, while pushing lots of pixels. For example, you
could write one of those 3d first person games, with levels stored as
scheme files and the enemy ai written in scheme. Another example is a
game like abuse, where pretty much all of the game is written in a
lisp-like language.

For serious apps, using guile for 'active content' (buzzword alert!)
on the web is probably the most likely candidate, though you could add
in a word processor that just isn't complete without a few animated
pictures to convince the user something exciting is going on. A
modeller with scheme as an extension language would also want this
sort of thing if it provides a way of creating and viewing
animations.
 
-- 
Greg