use Perl

• "Allow" (Score:2)

  by petdance (2468)

  allowing Wall and his minions to have his way.

  You seem to be implying that you can somehow disallow it.

  What's really sad is that GC algorithms are very well known and quite easy to use; the Boehm GC comes to mind immediately.

  It sounds you're upset because your patches to Perl 5 that implemented this GC were rejected?

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• It's easy to get it wrong (Score:2)

  by nicholas (3034)

  What's really sad is that GC algorithms are very well known and quite easy to use; the Boehm GC comes to mind immediately.

  What you're missing from this analysis is that swapping to mark & sweep GC, particularly a conservative GC such as Boehm, means that you no longer have any guarantee of the timing of destruction of objects, or even that they'll be (formally) destroyed at all, before program exit. So many of the existing uses of DESTROY in Perl would go out of the window, and the paradigm of Resource [wikipedia.org]
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    Hence it's easy to do something "obvious" and get it very wrong.

    Some hybrid systems use simple refcounting but occasionally run a full GC to reclaim circular references. As well, it's certainly possible to use a mortalize scheme for simple escape analysis to catch the majority of cases where you want timely destruction; most objects tend to have reference counts of zero or one.
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by petdance (2468)

    What you're missing from this analysis

    Using the word "analysis" here gives far too much credit. It is not "analysis" to say "Can't you just do a new GC?"

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• Wall obsession? (Score:1)

  by Aristotle (5147)

  This is the sort of things that we lose by allowing Wall and his minions to have his way.

  Uhm, the development effort for Perl 5 never ceased (although it bled momentum for a time for a long list of disparate reason), nor has Larry been involved in a very long time. In fact there is something of a schism and sometimes outright hostility between the 5 and 6 communities. It’s a convenient to identify a corrupt leader to project all problems onto, but it has little to do with reality.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by sigzero (5768)

    I did not know there was outright hostility. Why would that be?

    I am ignoring the original post by "ank" as tripe.
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147)

      Not these days so much, and I’m hoping it’s all in the past at this point.