From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_40,MSGID_SHORT autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 10 May 93 07:50:17 GMT From: pipex!uknet!root44!hrc63!mrcu!paj@uunet.uu.net (Paul Johnson) Subject: Re: Garbage collector necessary (for Ada access types)? Message-ID: <2848@snap> List-Id: In article monnier+@cs.cmu.edu (Stefan Monnier) write s: >If you don't want to spend too much time in your compiler just for the >GC problem (emitting code so that the GC knows what is a pointer andwhat >is not), you can use a conservative GC (you can even use 'ready-to-go' >ones for C: it replaces the malloc and the mfree becomes useless). But >beware its limitations: such GC is generally slower and doesn't guarantee >you won't have "memory leaks". I have a paper by Ben Zorn of the U of Colorado at Boulder. He measured the performance of the Boehm conservative GC in half a dozen programs and found that the slowdown was pretty trivial, although the programs did need about twice as much memory. The full report is CU-CS-573-92, April 1992, from Dept of Computer Science, Campus box 430, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309. Of course, a well tuned GC that has structure information available will do much better. For a good survey of GC techniques, see "Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques" by Paul R. Wilson, U. of Texas. . This paper is available by FTP, so try Archie before mailing Dr. Wilson. Paul. -- Paul Johnson (paj@gec-mrc.co.uk). | Tel: +44 245 73331 ext 3245 --------------------------------------------+---------------------------------- These ideas and others like them can be had | GEC-Marconi Research is not for $0.02 each from any reputable idealist. | responsible for my opinions