On Sat, 2009-01-10 at 13:16 -0800, Noah Gibbs wrote: > In addition to keeping a list of pointers to the object, you'll need > to traverse them in some way to find cycles and free storage with > cycles, but not pointed to by any non-cycles. That pass should not be > done every time you break a pointer link because it can be very > expensive, just as garbage collection is. You could do it > periodically, maybe every so many allocations or so many seconds -- > but if you do that, you've basically written a garbage collector.
I agree. However, cyclic references are basically a trademark for reference counting. It's relatively fast and easy to implement, but you probably don't want use this in combination with a garbage collector as the reference count other than zero is of no meaning to the collector. > Remember that an object can be part of more than one cycle, and you > have to know how many of those refs are "cyclic" refs, and how many > (if any) aren't from cycles. That's non-local knowledge. What I'm > saying is that it's not an easy think to calculate, and there's a > reason that garbage collectors tend to be slow :-) There are actually rather fast garbage collection algorithms out there. The main reason I can think of why they still appear to be slow is that in most cases they have to "stop the world" to do their processing. Hans _______________________________________________ Vala-list mailing list Vala-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
