Subject: Re: inhibiting GC
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/06/02
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3137330375665853@naggum.no>

* Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>
| Ask more memory from the system?

  you seem to have taken "no free memory" a bit differently than it was
  intended, but let's assume for the sake of argument that the system
  denies your request.  since this no different from asking more memory
  from a bounded set, the same argument applies: if GC occurs when there is
  no free memory available, what do you do?

| I'm not very familiar with other GC's, but I know that Elisp memory
| allocator does not GC when there is no more free memory

  since he was asking about the Allegro CL scavenging garbage collector, I
  thought it would be more instructive to answer in that context, but there
  are of course other GC implementations around.  Emacs', for instance, is
  horribly, horribly in efficient, and Allegro CL's is very fast and also
  very wasteful.  I'm not sure the reason is solely a question of when GC
  occurs, but after I modified my Emacs to let GC free pages that it had
  emptied of objects, it no longer grew to be quite so big.  go figure...

#:Erik
-- 
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century