On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 20:17 -0800, steve uurtamo wrote: > C > garbage collection: free().
Well, that's not garbage collection. You will begin to notice that if you are using shared data structures with different lifetimes. The question that comes up again and again is "can I free this structure here or does any part of my program hold a private pointer to this piece of data?" It is sometimes possible to group freeing objects (e.g., a compiler can free data structures it needs to compile a function when the end of the function is reached - this is called "arena freeing") but not always. > very fast. And it's not fast either. Free() has a reputation of being slow, and that's not surprising if you look at the way it is almost always implemented: scanning a list of addresses in order to amalgamate the newly freed memory with adjacent free areas. My personal experience is: if you can tolerate the 5-10% loss in execution speed, a real garbage collector is invaluable. Hellwig _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
