Subject: Re: Lisp without GC? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 18:57:48 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3234020268100648@naggum.net> * Hannah Schroeter | Not a Lisp, but might be interesting to consider in a "oh, such a thing | exists, perhaps we could get ideas from it" way (or to use it albeit it isn't | Lisp, of course), is the ML Kit (http://www.it-c.dk/research/mlkit/). | | It nowadays has a GC again, but version 3 IIRC relied only on compile time | region inference. I think I may want some form of defaulting to dynamic-extent so that it does exactly this, but the compiler will need to compute and propagate information about the usage of incoming arguments in a function so that a caller can know that no component of an argument was stored away elswhere. This is fairly easy to prove for the whole function, but the meta-information required about a function can easily lead to networks of information that lead to massive recompilation upon simple changes, something we generally do not want, even in fully incrementally compiled systems. Perhaps with lazy compilation like you can do with some virtual-machine based systems, this would not be so bad, but it is an "interesting" problem. Still, it would be very cool to use the stack and its cheap de/allocation rather than the garbage collector for the temporary data that only trigges garbage collection too often. -- Guide to non-spammers: If you want to send me a business proposal, please be specific and do not put "business proposal" in the Subject header. If it is urgent, do not use the word "urgent". If you need an immediate answer, give me a reason, do not shout "for your immediate attention". Thank you.