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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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PHP 5.3 includes garbage collection for circular references 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • 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]

    • 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.

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