I am also curious about this. Apologies, possibly naive question ahead :) My background is in C++. By choosing to work with immutable values (i.e. with a lot of consts), I found that I was able to avoid most of explicit memory management, pointers etc. Exceptions were:
(a) when interfacing with other people's code, and (b) when making optimisations, e.g. to save a needless copy-on-return. Otherwise everything happened behind the scenes as variables with "automatic" lifespan, passing into and out of scope, had their memory allocated and deallocated on the stack. Surely this is the most performant approach to memory management where it is possible? And doesn't Clojure's pure-functional ethos make it possible? Alistair On Dec 24, 7:23 am, Andrzej <ndrwr...@googlemail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 8:43 PM, mac <markus.gustavs...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> You might run into the problem than any C++ garbage collector you find > >> will probably not be quite as efficient as the JVM's garbage collector > >> (I don't think it would be possible to implement Clojure without a > >> GC). Additionally, a lot of Clojure's concurrency features rely on > >> Java's concurrency mechanisms and how these are mapped to the JVM's > >> concurrency semantics and memory model, for which you will also have > >> to find a suitable C++ library. > > > Yes, if you want to port Clojure to native code it might be easier to > > use a host language that already has these features but closely > > resembles C++. > > Candidates are D and the new Google Go. > > Go in particular seems interesting because one of their goals is to > > make a very efficient GC and the language is somewhat multicore aware. > > Is the generic GC the best tool for managing persistent data > structures? I imagine that each such data structure could be, for > example, stored in a separate circular data buffer (so that new chunks > can overwrite old ones without an added effort from the GC). > > Clojure exercises GC quite a lot but it does that in a somewhat > predictable manner (uses a lot of linked data structures). In > contrast, standard GC's are tuned for managing a smaller number of > irregular and relatively independent objects. Maybe writing a custom > GC is not that bad idea at all? > > Andrzej -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
