On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 19:16:20 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote: > That could be worse! Compacting GC's require twice the memory of a > non-compacting one. (you dont know how much garbage you have when you walk > the heap to GC so you need another empty heap of the same size to copy > everything into it)
Yes, I know, but it's only temporary. After that the other "side" of the heap can be unmapped in one go. Anyway, I think everybody knows GC is not a magic solution, but for a language like Python it seems you really do need at least some way to compress heap usage to a minimum and compacting GC does this quite well. > Mono and most other GC languages (gcj/java et al) also suffer from > memory leaks due to the boehm GC not being precise enough. The MS.NET GC is precise and does not leak. Given that Boehm GC can be given type info for where pointers are I don't see any reason why it *must* be this way, just that maybe Boehm GC isn't the right library for Mono yet. > The right solution is to not use a GC langugae for these kinds of apps > (unless they offer manual freeing of objects in addition to GC which the > boehm GC supports). Well, it's definitely true that many GCd platforms have quite poor performance unless you have tons of memory, but on the other hand we have to move on some time :) Anyway. I don't think this problem can be easily be solved, it's more important that people are aware of it and take it into consideration when using Python. thanks -mike _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
