Re: Optimizing Lua memory access/usage...

["John Belmonte" <jvb@...>]

Thatcher Ulrich wrote:

> I've been gradually working my way through the papers at
> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/oops/papers.html and it seems like,
> as noted in http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaInRealTimePrograms,
> someone just needs to crank out an implementation of Wilson's
> garbage collector.

Such an incremental garbage collector will allow hard real-time deadlines to
be met, but will not solve fragmentation issues.  These are separate
problems.

Lua's memory use can be tuned to alleviate gc time and fragmentation
somewhat, as Joshua is doing.  However I suspect that such tuning is hard to
maintain and not always effective.  For fragmentation, in an extreme case
just one byte allocated at the wrong time could result in megabytes of
unusable memory.

-John