A couple garbage collector questions

[Keith Ray]

In article <3d8zlgv0ab.fsf at ute.cnri.reston.va.us>, Andrew Kuchling 
<akuchlin at mems-exchange.org> wrote:

> "Tim Peters" <tim.one at home.com> writes:
> > [Douglas Alan]
> > > ...
> > > Another question: Why didn't Python just include Bohm's conservative
> > > GC package to implement Python's cycle detection?
> > 
> > Try it yourself, and you'll discover the answer.
> > 
> > or-at-least-today's-answer-ly y'rs  - tim
> 
> To clarify Tim's oracular answer, the last time it was tried there was
> a significant performance hit.  Patches for 1.5.2 are at   
> http://www.enme.ucalgary.ca/~nascheme/python/gc.html, so you 
> can experiment with them.  The Boehm package is also some awfully
> hairy code, so porting it to new platforms would be painful.  

I believe the makers of the product SmartHeap claim that linking the 
XWindows library with SmartHeap not only removed all memory leaks (using 
SmartHeap's garbage collection), but also improved its speed... has 
anyone tried linking Python with SmartHeap just for fun?

Unfortunately, IIRC, it is an expensive commercial product...

-- 
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