Re: Thinking about Lua memory management

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <rieru@...>]

Currently we are considering a change in the garbage collection algorithm
of Lua. But we do not want to slow down the interpreter, so the two schemes
discussed here (reference count and incremental collectors) do not seem very
atractive to us.

Instead, we are thinking about a generational collector, with a
write-barrier on tables. With a generational collector, we may be able to
have much shorter stops for most collecting cicles, and this savings may
compensate the overhead for the write barrier. So, maybe we could get not
only shorter gc cicles, but also an overall performance improvement.

-- Roberto