Re: Ada 0Y plans for garbage collection?

[Berend de Boer <berend@xsol.com>]

>>>>> "Ludovic" == Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@insalien.org> writes:

    Martin> I agree with you on that one. A reference counting access
    Martin> type would be as good a real garbage collector.
    >>  Only it adds a lot of overhead. A real garbage collector might
    >> take lots less cycles than all that reference counting.

    Ludovic> Linus Torvalds differs quite strongly on this:

But really has no idea what current gc's can do.

He says that compacting gc's solve the spatial locality. Performance
is not a problem he says, so let's dismiss the extra overhead he
mentions here, but had dismissed before.

Temporal locality is solved by generational gc's.

Start reading here:

  http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/pubs.html

In a hurry? Read just this:

  ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage/gcsurvey.ps


And Linux was talking about a specific case: max speed. Perhaps he was
correct. That doesn't imply gc is bad for every other app for which
speed isn't that all important.

-- 
Regards,

Berend. (-: