Re: [boost] request for interest in a garbage collection library

Subject: Re: [boost] request for interest in a garbage collection library
From: joaquin_at_[hidden]
Date: 2009-04-21 10:57:33

Achilleas Margaritis escribió:
>> AFAICS, you can have an implementation of delete where "delete p" simply 
>> calls the destructor of the object pointed to by p and then passes p to
>> an internal garbage collector that will reclaim the memory in due time.
>> This way you have determinstic resource liberation *and* GC speed.
>>     
>
> If you do that, what is the point of keeping the memory occupied by 'p' 
> around? the object will be destroyed anyway and therefore it will not be 
> of any use.
>   

The point is that deferring memory release to the next GC round can be 
faster than
releasing every little piece of memory immediately, at least in some 
scenarios:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/#details

Take into acount that free(x) is by no means free in terms of execution 
time (no pun intended)
--some bookkeeping has to be done by the internal memory manager when 
freeing a
block of memory.

Joaquín M López Muñoz
Telefónica, Investigación y Desarrollo