Re: [Fresco-devel] ref counting

On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 09:59:56PM -0500, Sean Rae wrote:
> > 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 :-)
> I was thinking that in every constructor, the object being created could
> register itself with some service inside of Fresco (strictly for
> developers' use), e.g. inside of Bob() would be _service_register(*this)
> or something similar. That way, if you know that foo_bar() will allocate 4
> objects by how you design (or rather, n+i objects, or whatever), then you
> can allocation_service_assert(4 objects) and it will pop up an error
> message if the method allocated 40 objects instead of 4.  I don't know how
> useful it would be, but it might prove to be a good double-checker for
> allocations.  Hopefully the scene-graph rewrite with the better memory
> management that you referred to will nullify this problem.  See ya.

Oh, huh.  Interesting.  There might be a performance hit when using
it... but then again, with omni's design, there might not be.  To be
thought about.

-- Nathaniel

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