fork()

[Graham Matthews]

Graham Matthews wrote:
> But the reality is that copying memory can in fact speed applications
> up! Think about locality of reference after you have copied all live
> blocks to the start of memory.
Vladimir Marangozov (Vladimir.Marangozov at inrialpes.fr) wrote:
: True enough. At least, it sounds true and promising ;-)
: However, locality of reference (LOR) is something quite hard to measure
: in practice. One has to tweak the kernel to collect some stats on this,
: and even if one achieves LOR improvements on a partuclar system, say
: Solaris, it could result in a LOR degradation on Linux or Windows.
: Not to mention that nowadays nobody wants to play this game...

Sure I agree with all this. I am just saying that it's quite simplistic
nowdays to assume that copying objects when collecting is a bad idea.
It used to be the case that copying was bad -- that's why mark and sweep
collectors were invented before copying collectors. But on modern CPUs
and modern OS's it's no longer uniformly true.

Vladimir Marangozov (Vladimir.Marangozov at inrialpes.fr) wrote:
: Graham, you said that you won't contribute a RC+GC scheme to Python, despite
: your positive experience. If you change your mind and consider
: devoting some spare time to give it a try, I'll devote some spare
: time to help you with Python's internals and we'll see whether we
: could come up with something viable, which could compete with the
: actual RC scheme alone. Does this sound constructive enough? :-)

Very constructive indeed! I am indeed sorry that I don't have the time
to contribute code for a collector for Python. I think it would be greatly
beneficial. But between working on a language of my own, and working on
my PhD, well there is only a finite amount of time in a week (damn shame
that!). 

I was actually wondering if anyone had done any work putting the Boehm
collector under Python. The Boehm collector was designed to run in a
C environment.

graham
-- 
           As you grow up and leave the playground
       where you kissed your prince and found your frog
          Remember the jester that showed you tears
                   the script for tears