On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:04:37 +0200 Laurent Sansonetti <laurent.sansone...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Perry, > > On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 12:07 AM, Perry E. Metzger > <pe...@piermont.com> wrote: > > On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:44:56 -0700 Matt Aimonetti > > <mattaimone...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> See my earlier reply, basically, you are right, it is technically > >> possible to change the way MacRuby works to use an automatic > >> reference counting approach. > >> But it's far from being trivial. > > > > Wouldn't reference counting radically change the behavior of Ruby > > in the presence of cycles though? It would no longer be exactly > > the same language -- libraries that used cyclic data structures > > internally would need to be rewritten. > > > > Some people managed to have ref counting GCs that are able to deal > with cycles.
These techniques fall into a couple of categories: run a real GC every once in a while, or require user code changes (some of which could reduce safety guarantees). The latter technique in conjunction with reference counting is probably a great compromise in a C or Objective C context -- the environment already does lots of manual memory management and is already not safe. For something like Ruby, though, it feels much less clean. Using reference counting to reduce the number of sweep passes for a real GC would probably be fine, of course. That might reduce MacRuby's real memory runtime footprint a lot, too, as transiently used objects would vanish very fast. If I recall correctly, almost all objects never have more than one reference and die extremely fast. Perry -- Perry E. Metzger pe...@piermont.com _______________________________________________ MacRuby-devel mailing list MacRuby-devel@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
