Subject: Re: Lisp w/out GC
From: rpw3@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 04:51:55 -0600
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <n5KdnZuNscLWN2-i4p2dnA@speakeasy.net>
Christopher C. Stacy <cstacy@news.dtpq.com> wrote:
+---------------
| You don't need a garbage collector unless the amount of garbage
| that you're going to create exceeds the amount of memory available.
+---------------

Indeed. A friend of mine has a small Scheme implementation he wrote
that has no garbage collection at all [just allocates as needed with
"malloc()"]. He uses it for quick & dirty Unix shell scripting and
CGI scripts, and it's fine for that.

+---------------
| Lisp on the Lisp Machine included features for explicit storage
| management (although there were also tied into the garbage collector).
+---------------

Also, see the "PreScheme" dialect which is the implementation language
for the Scheme48 VM. PreScheme is compiled to C, and has no implicit GC.


-Rob

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