[chuck-users] GC vs real-time (was Getting Started with ChucK)

[Hans Aberg]

On 23 Jul 2009, at 21:10, Tom Duff wrote:

>> This is a survey article. Which method is used?
>
> Sorry, missed by one: the correct reference is one paper north on  
> Wilson's
> page: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~oops/papers.html
>
> Paul R. Wilson and Mark S. Johnstone.
> Real-Time Non-Copying Garbage Collection.
> Position paper for the 1993 ACM OOPSLA Workshop on Memory Management
> and Garbage Collection, Washington D.C.
> September 1993.
>
> ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage/GC93/wilson.ps

It is hard to get an idea of this without somebody testing it  
thoroughly.

But a quick netsearch says that a non-copying GC gets problem with  
memory fragmentation. So there are research papers on how to handle  
that.

This is also a problem that can be handled by adding more RAM. But  
what happens is that one avoids doing GC causing the problem, not  
solving the GC problem.

Also, it is a uniprocessor GC (or so I though I saw). There is a  
comment here about OCaml have that restriction (last sentences in  
section):
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml#Features

   Hans