[Caml-list] meta-gc (Re: concurrent gc?)

[Raoul Duke <raould@gmail.com>]

> I agree with Malcolm's experience, and my situation might be similar to
> yours: games -- a lot of allocations at high framerate. I'm guessing this
> from how evil you consider pauses to be. ;)

yes, interactive apps.

> allocators -- you still need to use dynamic allocations wisely. Here, I
> think the biggest problem is when you have a GC, you lose awareness of the
> allocations you're triggering.

yes, those are nice down to earth wise words that need to be said more
often in every class :-)

to kick the question up a meta-level: Does anybody have thoughts on
how to best orthogonalize actual memory allocation from where the
application says it wants it? I mean if I write a stupid loop that
makes a zillion particles in the middle of each frame render then yes
I'm an idiot, sure... but what things can be done to actually allow
such idiocy to squeak by?

Maybe that's a horrible thing to suggest as it just panders. But I
like to think of it more along the lines of trying to tease things
apart as much as possible, and then some more (to corrupt an infamous
meme).

[In some sense that is what GC purported to be when it was being sold
like snake oil :-) and for a long time "regular" programmers knew
better and would make fun of e.g. lisp programmers.]