[gclist] Instanteneous GC

[Richard Kelsey]

At 11:49 PM 7/28/99 -0400, Tim Sweeney wrote:
>So, my question is: is there any reasonably efficient way to do
>instantaneous garbage collection, using a write-barrier function that can
>immediately determine that objects have become garbage?

Wouldn't immediate garbage collection make a program's behavior
harder to predict, not easier?  Allocation would be fast and
predictable, because you would never have to wait while space was
found.  The cost is that any operation that could drop a pointer,
such as a write or leaving a variable's scope, could potentially
trigger a long delay while newly unreachable objects are reclaimed.

                                        -Richard Kelsey