[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ludovic Courtès) writes: > IOW, property values are to be "collected" _after_ the Scheme value to > which they are attached has been collected.
The manual talks from the perspective of a Scheme program here. For a Scheme program, the important information is that some object is not collected _before_ some condition is true. Thus, the wording in the manual should be read as 'not before' instead of as 'strictly after'. Maybe we should change the manual accordingly. C code can observe the GC doing its thing (via the smob free functions). In order not to overconstrain the implementation of the GC (which is pretty constrained already anyway), we have the additional rule that there is no guarantee about the order in which objects are swept during the sweep phase. Why do you need this guarantee? (If you really need this feature, I will start talking you into using guardians to enforce some order on finalization.) > In any case, if a value P is attached as a property of some object O, > then O should be "collected" _before_ P. Why? Isn't it enough to say 'P is not collected before O is unreachable'? GC's usually don't make any guarantee about what happens with an object it has become unreachable. For example, once O and P become unreachable, it would be totally acceptable for a GC to collect P but to never get around to actually collect O. (The GC could be generational: O could be in the oldest generation and P in the youngest. The youngest generation might be collected every MiB of allocated memory, but the oldest generation might only be collected on weekends and during national holidays. :) -- GPG: D5D4E405 - 2F9B BCCC 8527 692A 04E3 331E FAF8 226A D5D4 E405 _______________________________________________ Guile-devel mailing list Guile-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/guile-devel
