Python 2.0

[adjih at technologist.com]

In article <7j44ql$908$1 at cronkite.cc.uga.edu>,
  graham at sloth.math.uga.edu (Graham Matthews) wrote:
> Aahz Maruch (aahz at netcom.com) wrote:
> : In addition to Paul's excellent comments, if one is writing an
> : interactive process, one cannot afford the unpredictability of
random
> : garbage collection.  Garbage collection could run in a thread, but
then
> : one is restricted to environments where threads are well-supported.
>
> You appear to be making an argument like "when a GC occurs the system
> pauses, and this is bad in an interactive environment". If that's the
> case then this is an old chestnut. Modern GC implementations do not
> have such pauses. Look up papers on real-time garbage collection for
> example.

Hmm... How do you do multi-thread real-time (i.e. incremental) GC being
a) portable (must run on PalmPilot, WinCE, Unix, Mac,...) b) without
relying on assumptions [that will fail in some programs] (such as "very
few writes in shared space"). The supplementary condition would be "c)
efficient" which would be useful for languages such as C/C++ or compiled
Java, but I grant you that this is not necessary for the current Python,
and that we are comparing here to reference counting anyway.


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