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From: srt@aero.org (Scott "TCB" Turner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Memory Management in Lisp?
Message-ID: <1991Feb18.191549.7575@aero.org>
Date: 18 Feb 91 19:15:49 GMT
References: <1991Feb15.191259.20090@aero.org> <1991Feb15.223520.17267@Think.COM>
Sender: news@aero.org
Organization: The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA
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(Barry Margolin) writes:
>I'm not even sure how good a portable memory management mechanism
>could be in a Lisp environment.  Could you describe the kind of
>interface you're hoping for?

I haven't really given it much thought.  But it has always seemed
strange to me that Lisp in general gives little control over memory
management to the user, when it is so obviously critical to system
performance.

I've been thinking about the subject since my original post, and one
facility I think might be interesting is a garbage collection advisor.
Currently gc collects an object if it has no references.  The idea
here is to let gc collect an object if the (user-supplied) advisor
predicate returns true.

						-- Scott Turner