Re: Unlocking circular references (was: loosing memory in compiled code)

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, Leon Bottou wrote:

> On Wednesday 22 February 2006 03:57 pm, you wrote:

>> Turns out that this was not the only locking bug, though. I also
>> found that the garbage collector cannot purge circular structures,
>> and I use circular lists frequently in conjunction with mapcar. E.g.:
>
> That is a limitation of reference counting.
> A second mark and sweep garbage collector runs whenever an error occurs.
> This one can clear circular structures.  It cannot run in general because
> nothing tracks the set of roots stored in C variables.
>
> In the mean time, you should break the circular structure with (delete xxx)

Thanks.

Wouldn't then an interface to the mark and sweep gc be a good idea?
You may want to call it once in a while in applications that run for
a while.

Ralf




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