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in reply to Re: Re: On timely destruction?
in thread On timely destruction?

Thanks for the vote of confidence, bu I should point out that I am the brainpower in this case, along with a stack of books and papers by people rather more clever than I am. If it was easy or inexpensive to do this, I wouldn't be asking the question.

Ah, then your solution is indeed somewhat different. I would suggest instead a garbage collection API, such that others who may have some brilliant idea we had not thought of may later come along and implement "deterministic but slow" gc, and someone else may come along and implement "never executes a destructor but is blindingly fast" gc, and yet another may simply look at the standard does-its-best gc and think "I can do better".

If you make it practical for others to implement their own GC if necessary, you can give away the question of whether determinism is needed currently and put it back on the stack for the people who need it (itch stratch) to worry about it.

I think your determination that refcounting is the only solution for a language with references is premature. While I agree that, in the general case, it is unlikely there are any alternatives, in the specific case of an embedded system with a number of precisely known quantities such as memory, code to execute and others, refcounting is only one of many potential solutions to the problem, including the potential option of saying "I don't need to gc at all", and another of saying "well shit, we'll just add some gc-supporting hardware to our board since we're suffering so much from it.."

So, in summary, it is my determination (still :) that the option needs to be available for deterministic GC. I do not, however, think that you need do it, only that the option is readily available. I'm not convinced simply being open-source is enough in this case, the capability to select at build-time (at least, but probably good enough) the GC desired easily is one acceptable way of providing others with both the option and the motivation to implement the GC that fits their needs best.

You never know, some smart-ass research group might decide that, with parrot supporting so many languages, and with such an easy plug-in for the GC, they could spend a bunch of research money coming up with something with stupifyingly tricky statistical optimisations we daren't consider, which take parrots GC beyond state of the art. Such things are inclined to happen when the architecture supports it.

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Re: Re: Re: Re: On timely destruction?
by Elian (Parson) on Aug 29, 2002 at 18:31 UTC
    Thanks for the vote of confidence, bu I should point out that I am the brainpower in this case, along with a stack of books and papers by people rather more clever than I am. If it was easy or inexpensive to do this, I wouldn't be asking the question.

    Ah, then your solution is indeed somewhat different. I would suggest instead a garbage collection API,

    While there will be a GC API, unfortunately it's not the solution in this case. Reference counting can't be added in after the fact, since it involves a lot of code, scattered through all the core and extension source, hat we wouldn't otherwise be writing. That's one of the advantages to tracing collectors--you don't have to worry about GC code in your mainline code.
    I think your determination that refcounting is the only solution for a language with references is premature.
    Unfortunately not. For true timely DESTROY calling, it's the only option. (Though whether destruction can ever be truly deterministic in the presence of threads, closures, and continuations is up in the air)

    Choosing timely destruction in the face of references requires refcounting. (timely, here, meaning "as soon as the last reference to an object goes away")

    There's no way to do static analysis of a program such that you can determine at compile time when a variable is no longer used, since taking a reference allows a variable to escape its scope. Throw in some of the heavy introspection capabilities that are on the way and you're completely out of luck, since library code you may not know about can peek at and take references to your lexicals.

    Since we can't do static analysis, that requires a runtime solution. And for that it's either tracing every time a variable dies (which is really pricey), or reference counting.

    So, in summary, it is my determination (still :) that the option needs to be available for deterministic GC.
    But the question is still why? For what purpose? What will break, besides personal comfort, without at least the illusion of timely destruction? Abigail's given a few examples, most of which can be dealt with in other ways. How many classes have you written that both have a DESTROY and would behave oddly if the timing of those DESTROY calls weren't apparently set in stone? And if you have them, at what granularity is DESTROY calling acceptable?
      I have one, although it isn't in perl (C++), which makes a connection to an HL7/DICOM broker. The broker will only support 1 tcp connection at a time..well, you can imagine the mess that comes from that.

      However again, I can solve that in other ways. I guess the important thing is that, if we cannot get timely destruction (And I believe refcounting to be too high a price to pay for it) then it should be simple best-effort, get the destroy as close as reasonably practical to where it would normally be, and try and special-case resource contention to avoid the file-lock problem and equivalents.

      I will consider further the problems involved in timely destruction. If I have any further ideas I'll let you know.