Re: RFC: Foreign objects in perl

[Ken Fox]

Dan Sugalski wrote:
> At 09:25 AM 8/6/00 -0400, Ken Fox wrote:
> > We're definitely going to have some sort of traversing collector. It
> > might only augment the ref count collector.
> 
> I'd rather not have multiple GC schemes going at once. (Though we may need
> some sort of "refered to by" field to track variables that have had
> references to them taken, so we know when the last referent goes out of scope)

I can say right now that mark-sweep won't work by itself. Neither will
ref count. Combine them together and it might work well enough. (Perl also
needs some way of dealing with young data which suggests that a special
stack allocator with write barriers is needed.) If we abandon ref count, then
we also need to make sure the new collector is ephemeral. People will *not*
be happy if their scripts visibly pause to GC. (Billions of invisible
pauses like we have today go undetected... ;)

- Ken