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Thanks for the vote of confidence, bu I should point out that I am the brainpower in this case, along with a stack of books and papers by people rather more clever than I am. If it was easy or inexpensive to do this, I wouldn't be asking the question.

Ah, then your solution is indeed somewhat different. I would suggest instead a garbage collection API, such that others who may have some brilliant idea we had not thought of may later come along and implement "deterministic but slow" gc, and someone else may come along and implement "never executes a destructor but is blindingly fast" gc, and yet another may simply look at the standard does-its-best gc and think "I can do better".

If you make it practical for others to implement their own GC if necessary, you can give away the question of whether determinism is needed currently and put it back on the stack for the people who need it (itch stratch) to worry about it.

I think your determination that refcounting is the only solution for a language with references is premature. While I agree that, in the general case, it is unlikely there are any alternatives, in the specific case of an embedded system with a number of precisely known quantities such as memory, code to execute and others, refcounting is only one of many potential solutions to the problem, including the potential option of saying "I don't need to gc at all", and another of saying "well shit, we'll just add some gc-supporting hardware to our board since we're suffering so much from it.."

So, in summary, it is my determination (still :) that the option needs to be available for deterministic GC. I do not, however, think that you need do it, only that the option is readily available. I'm not convinced simply being open-source is enough in this case, the capability to select at build-time (at least, but probably good enough) the GC desired easily is one acceptable way of providing others with both the option and the motivation to implement the GC that fits their needs best.

You never know, some smart-ass research group might decide that, with parrot supporting so many languages, and with such an easy plug-in for the GC, they could spend a bunch of research money coming up with something with stupifyingly tricky statistical optimisations we daren't consider, which take parrots GC beyond state of the art. Such things are inclined to happen when the architecture supports it.


In reply to Re: Re: Re: On timely destruction? by PhiRatE
in thread On timely destruction? by Elian

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