Re: [Fresco-devel] ref counting

On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 02:07:21PM -0500, Sean Rae wrote:
> Just a thought from someone who knows programming but doesn't know
> CORBA... Would there be a way to have something in the same stadium as a
> garbage collector except that it tracks allocations instead of lifetime?
> It could tell the programmer when there are extra objects laying around
> that need to be dealt with.  That way, this debugging feature could be
> used to watch the memory allocation (and any leaks) of the program by
> totalling the current objects that should be in memory compared to the
> current objects that actually are in memory. Or possibly alert a newbie
> (me?) to what is actually happening.  What do ya'll think?

I'm not sure what you mean by "tracks allocations instead of
lifetime".  In general, though, distributed garbage collecting is a
wildly unsolved problem; the server can't tell whether some remote
client is still holding a reference to an object or not, and the
client can't tell whether an object that it no longer has a reference
to had its reference count correctly decremented when the last
reference was dropped.  Well, except, there is one way -- make sure
that whenever you see a new reference, you increment the count, and
whenever you forget about a reference, you decrement the count.  This
is what _var's do :-)

Some of these issues may change around a lot as we redo the scene
graph stuff, and make it less CORBA-exposed; we should think about how
the new architecture could make memory management simpler...

-- Nathaniel

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