[gclist] Experience with conservative GC sought

[Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]]

>>>>> "Jim" =3D=3D Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com> writes:

Jim> Oy.  I suspect you have not done significant work on Emacs.  Almost
Jim> every release of Emacs has had some bugs related to improper
Jim> maintenance of the stack root list.  Stallman admits he makes these
Jim> mistakes frequently himself, so I don't think it's an issue of
Jim> programmer competence.  (Come on, you know what I mean. :) )

I wish it were that simple: Conservative GC can also cause GC bugs to
occur, and they are typically harder to track down than problems with
explicit GC root management.  Hans Boehm elaborated on this.
Admittedly, these bugs occur much less frequently.

Jim> I'm running SCWM, the Scheme-Configurable Window Manager for X
Jim> Windows, which is based on Guile.  That's a long-running
Jim> application.

How big is its heap typically?

Jim> I haven't noticed any leakage bugs.  Aubrey Jaffer uses his Scheme
Jim> system, SCM, on which Guile is based, for long-running digital circu=
it
Jim> simulations, and reports that he has never encountered a storage lea=
k
Jim> due to the conservative GC. =


I've seen profiles of this and they always have been for heaps < 4
Megs.  Emacs is a different animal in this respect.

-- =

Cheers =3D8-} Mike
Friede, V=F6lkerverst=E4ndigung und =FCberhaupt blabla