From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,aa2e415128e40fff X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Question about garbage collection Date: 1998/04/20 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 346155647 References: <6h851g$sq$1@news.tm.net.my> <6hf8jj$p9a$1@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> X-Complaints-To: usenet@news.nyu.edu X-Trace: news.nyu.edu 893122715 24046 (None) 128.122.140.58 Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-04-20T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Fergus says <<>I assume this is a conservative garbage collector. This is not the same as >true GC, but is often quite effective. Damning with faint praise? >> No, I did not mean to be that negative at all. I meant it when I said this is often quite effective. It is easy to construct cases where it fails completely (e.g. a circular structure that in its entirety could be collected), but in practice, it works pretty well a lot of the time, and in an application where the only penalty for not collecting perfectly is performance rather than malfunction, conservative garbage collection is attractive precisely because it is simple, reliable, and does NOT require all sorts of complexity added to the compiler.