Re: GC [was Re: Lua 5.1 (work4) now available]

[Mark Hamburg <mhamburg@...>]

Interesting graphs. From a separation of concerns standpoint, is there an
easy way to turn off the generational aspect of the collector?

In theory, an incremental collector should move forward in proportion to the
amount of memory being allocated. The faster it moves forward, the more
overhead it consumes but the faster it should manage to clear out dead data
structures.

For a generational collector, you also need to throw in the issue of how
fast objects are getting tenured since tenured objects will actually be
slower to collect. Intuitively, I would think that one would want to drive a
collector working on the tenured objects forward at a rate proportional to
the rate at which objects get tenured. But that's just a guess by analogy
with the simple incremental case.

Mark