Hans;
You have sent seven identical mail to this list - it suffices with one.
Personally I didn't think those mails were the same. They do all touch on -perceived- shortcomings of ChucK. This, I feel, is fair; it's unfinished and under-documented. My own recommendation to Tambet would be to try to get a feel for things and see how far one can get. ChucK, like any other language, has its own ways of solving issues. It also has shortcomings, issues and many bugs.
ChucK does have a GC, a reference count, though not fully implemented. If you check the archive of this list, there has been some discussions about that, about a year ago, I think.
Indeed, but the current state of GC is only vaguely documented. It's only in the list archives and only because Mike Clemow and -to a lesser degree- me pushed function arguments and array elements to their limits that we were able to infer something about what we have now.
It has also been discussed other types of GC. A problem with a collecting GC is that it must work with the perfect timing that ChucK has, which syncs every sample time (at about 44 kHz).
Indeed. But we don't have to calculate a sample every sample; we only need to calculate a block every block; there is some leeway. What I am wondering about is what is leading Tambert to send these seven (trusting on Hans's counting here) emails. Perhaps Tambert is trying to do something very hard that is running into real bottlenecks. If Tambert could send some code that has issues we could have a look at what could be done to avoid the issues it might run into. Yours, Kas.