For starters, in glossary.pod I'm failing to find definitions for "destruction" and "finalisation". One is about cleanup actions on objects/ PMCs that need something actively cleaned up, rendering active objects down to bare memory, and the other is about reclaiming bare memory for re-use.
For starters, I'm interested in the first one - rendering down active objects to bare memory, whatever it's called. I'm also not directly interested in "high priority DOD" for "timely destruction" of hot objects. What I want to know is does parrot make any guarantee that all objects will be rendered down to bare memory before program exit? At interpreter exit perl 5 scans all the active allocated scalars to find objects, and causes all references to them to be undefined, which will cause DESTROY to be called on all of them. This will even catch objects trapped in reference counting loops. Second question is that optionally perl 5 can run with complete global destruction. This is primarily intended for embedded interpreters, where the default implementation (just exit the process to free all memory) is clearly not an option. Does parrot have any sort of built in ability to change mode to force all memory ever allocated to be freed up? At the moment ponie is tracking all PMCs it allocates so that it can emulate both the object destruction, and the full destruction. I'm wondering if there is parrot infrastructure I can use to avoid needing to do this. Nicholas Clark
