Re: [Caml-list] Can GC be BLOCKed?

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

On Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 04:39:26PM +0300, Dmitry Bely wrote:
> On 12/1/06, Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org> wrote:
> 
> >I've only seen two cases where I'd want to stop the GC from running:
> >(1) During quasi real-time operations (eg. a single frame in a game) --
> >this can be solved by making the heap large enough and running the GC
> >at scheduled points.  (2) When the heap is larger than physical RAM --
> >this is solved using our 'Ancient' module.
> 
> I have a main program in C that periodically calls an OCaml function
> and expects the (near) real time response. So I'd like to avoid gc
> inside that function. My current plan is to have another OCaml thread
> that is unfrozen just before returning results to C and does the minor
> (or major - how to decide which one?) garbage collection. Will it
> work?

I guess it'll work - the thing to do is to try it.  I'm wondering why
you need a real time response, and I also hope you're avoiding any
sort of memory allocation on the C side, because malloc and free are
hardly real time functions either.  Many C programmers seem to treat
them as if they were O(1) operations though.

Rich.

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