In the past there have been discussions about allowing a programmer to manually invoke the garbage
collector as is possible for other programming languages.
For debugging purposes it may be mandatory in certain situations to be able to manually invoke the
garbage collector as lately discussed on the RexxLA member list in the context of the ooRexx
debugger by Dom Wise.
Most programming languages allow for debugging purposes the interaction with the garbage collector,
e.g., Python [1], PHP [2], Java [3] (a very nice overview!), .Net [4] (e.g. C#). All of these are
major programming languages and/or garbage collecting runtime environments.
There are (granted rare) situations where it becomes important for developers to manually invoke the
garbage collector which ooRexx - unlike other programming languages - currently lacks. For such
scenarios a gc()-BIF would allow to debug edge cases linked to garbage collection which is quite
important for such ooRexx programs and libraries.
Having a gc()-BIF would allow the ooRexx developers to employ the garbage collector manually if this
becomes necessary.
[To inhibit naive usage, one could e.g. force the use of gc() by first enabling it and then running
the garbage collector or supplying an argument like "run manually", such that not only the
documentation for gc() would warn from improper use, but make its use a little bit cumbersome such
that it only gets used when really needed. OTOH, I think that ooRexx programmers who use gc() would
not do so naively.]
---rony
[1] Garbage Collection in Python, 2023:
<https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/garbage-collection-python/>
[2] Garbage Collection in PHP, 2013:
<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19715048/what-gc-collect-cycles-function-is-useful-for>
[3] Nayak S., Garbage Collection in Java (very nice introductory overview), 2021:
<https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/garbage-collection-in-java-what-is-gc-and-how-it-works-in-the-jvm/>
[4] .Net (e.g., C#), 2021:
<https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.gc?view=net-9.0>
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