Re: Garbage collection (was Re: JWZ on s/Java/Perl/)

[Ken Fox]

Alan Burlison wrote:
> I think you'll find that both GC *and* reference counting scheme will
> require the heay use of mutexes in a MT program.

There are several concurrent GC algorithms that don't use
mutexes -- but they usually depend on read or write barriers
which may be really hard for us to implement. Making them run
well always requires help from the OS memory manager and that
would hurt portability. (If we don't have OS support it means
auditing everybody's XS code to make sure they use wrappers
with barrier checks on all writes. Yuck.)

- Ken