Re: perl 6 requirements

On Mon, Jul 31, 2000 at 01:28:05PM +0100, Alan Burlison wrote:
> The trouble with all automated garbage collection schemes is that they
> tend to be non-deterministic.  Having your program grind to  a halt at
> irregular intervals is not a good thing.  What about some sort of
> hybrid, using reference counting as the first and default way of
> reclaiming memory, with a full GC pass at selectable points, e.g. never,
> every n seconds, whenever a block bigger than a given size is allocated,
> at interpreter instance exit, on demand etc.  The existing refcount
> mechamism has worked well, and has predictable behaviour.  It seems a
> shame to throw it out in favour of something that in most cases probably
> won't work as well.

This was a hot topic during Chips talk at TPC and I am sure it will get
a lot of discussion on the internals mailing list whenever it is setup.

Please don't fill this list with a discussion on the merits/flaws of
various GC algorithms.

Thanks,
Graham.