Re: garbage collection thoughts... again?!

["Peter Hill" <corwin@...>]

Basile STARYNKEVITCH:
> I don't think that the Lua mailing list is the good place to discuss
> garbage collection in general.

But a good place where it relates to Lua. Especially since Lua5.1 is planned
to have (so I have heard) incremental, possibly generational GCing.

One thing I think is worth specifying is the goals.

For example: should the GC be completely transparent to the coder (a nice
ideal), or is the coder required to know the process (eg: with reference
counting the programmer can act to minimise circular references).

Despite the recent non-shrinking-table oddity (the programmer having to be
aware of implementation so that they can poke a dummy value into a table to
free up its excess memory) I get the *impression* that Lua is designed to be
quite high level and as independent of internal implementation methods as
possible. If this is so then it weakens the desirabiliy of reference counts
for Lua.

*cheers*
Peter Hill