Re: Garbage collector on Ada?

[Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen <oleh@vlinux.voxelvision.no>]

Darren New <dnew@san.rr.com> writes:

> Pedro Menendez wrote:
> > someone told me that it would be quite impossible considering Ada is
> > a real-time language,
> 
> Well, unless you used a real-time garbage collector. It sounds like
> "someone" isn't up on this decade's technology.
> 
> Hmmm... Looks like "someone" isn't even up on how Google works.
> 
> http://lieber.www.media.mit.edu/people/lieber/Lieberary/GC/Realtime/Realtime.html

Baker's algorithm is old and well known and pretty good. But the
problem with any copying garbage collector, including this new one, is
that if you copy large objects, that *may* be enough to disturb your
timing, unless you run the garbage collector in a separate thread, and
thus allows the copying to be interrupted. Baker's original paper
mentions this, and also explains why running the garbage collector in
a separate thread is difficult.

But I agree, GC is good for may applications, and with some care, can
be used even for RT applications.