Hi Rony, lots of managed memory languages can trigger their garbage collectors and everybody should be free to shoot themselves in the foot performance-wise; a well-placed bogo-sort or a well-meant but poorly executed SQL statement can do that already. The documentation should state that you are probably doing something wrong if you need to invoke it, but I think that is as far as our responsibility goes.
best regards, René. > On 26 Aug 2025, at 16:28, Rony G. Flatscher <rony.flatsc...@wu.ac.at> wrote: > > There is a new library for ooRexx in development by one of my students, where > objects from the other side get proxied in registries. For debugging, it is > necessary to be able to kick off a garbage collection run. > > However, as has been pointed out and discussed, it has been seen as dangerous > for the performance of ooRexx programs if ooRexx programmers use such a > feature wrongly (e.g., too many times at the wrong place, etc.). > > My take would be that if programmers are made aware of that potential problem > and strongly advised not to use it for regular programs, only for situations > where it becomes important that external resources get freed that are held by > Rexx objects that became garbage but do not get garbage collected in a timely > manner. > > Maybe an approach like this can be acceptable? > > define a gc() built-in function that works by default in a debug version of > ooRexx (i.e., RexxInfo~debug yields .true) and returns .true to indicate that > the BIF got carried out, > > invoking some gc() on the release version of ooRexx (i.e., RexxInfo~debug > yields .false) does not invoke the garbage collector and returns therefore > .false. > > for very rare, special situations (like freeing external resources as timely > as possible if Rexx objects pinning them down turn to garbage) it may make > sense to allow gc() to be run on a release version; in order to make this > explicit one could think of allowing an argument like "EMERGENCY" > (intentionally in uppercase and spelled out), but only for the release > version, which would indeed invoke the garbage collection on a release > version as well and then return .true to indicate it. This would inhibit a > mistakenly usage of gc(). If one leaves the gc() invocation from the debug > version, it would not run the garbage collector by default on a release > version. If, however, a programmer needs a garbage collection in the release > version, it must be "cumbersomely" invoked, such that this can only happen > intentionally. > What do you think? Any comments? > > ---rony > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Oorexx-devel mailing list > Oorexx-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oorexx-devel
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