Cool, thanks, lots of info to chew on. On 06/02/2011 01:24 PM, Neil Van Dyke wrote: > My current interest is in satisfying a client's request (to analyze > certain things with the GC disabled), but here's a few reasons I can > imagine that people sometimes want to disable GC in languages in general > (not specific to Racket): > > * Performance: you have a fairly short-lived performance-sensitive > program, you don't want to pay the time cost of GC, and you have enough > RAM. In Racket, I haven't noticed GC being a problem. (Before Java > became popular, and when computers were a *lot* slower, it was common > for people to be prejudiced against GC'd languages, and there were jokes > about getting "collecting garbage..." messages at inopportune moments in > life-critical real-time systems. I don't see much of that sentiment > anymore.) > > * Evaluation: related to performance, but another way to measure the > cost of GC when tuning, with the intention of normally running with GC. > In Racket, there are other ways to measure GC cost, and this would be an > additional way. > > * Debugging: if you're debugging when doing low-level programming or > interfacing with less-trustworthy C code, disabling GC lets you > eliminate GC as a possible cause of trouble. Again, in Racket, this > isn't a concern for most people, just like it's not a concern for most > Java programmers. > > * Extremely Unusual Situations: if you're in the unusual situation of > doing something normally considered inadvisable, like you're > intentionally designing the SR-71 to leak fuel, maybe there's some > bizarre rocket-scientist reason understood only by you that you have to > turn off GC just to get your app to fly in one piece. Almost no one > will ever need this, and, in the case of Racket, they could always add > it if they did. > > BTW, for the mechanism for disabling GC, I think I actually have a > preference for having all the GC code in place as normal, so that the > usual code paths are used, and simply having the (conceptual) > do-we-want-to-do-a-gc-cycle-now function always return false. I'd try > to avoid running any blocks of code not already covered by users who are > running GC. > > > Eduardo Bellani wrote at 06/02/2011 10:01 AM: >> Out of curiosity, why would you want to disable GC? >> >> On 06/02/2011 10:30 AM, Matthew Flatt wrote: >> >>> At Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:25:04 -0400, Neil Van Dyke wrote: >>> >>>> When running Racket apps from the command line, is there a way to >>>> disable garbage collection? >>>> >>> There's currently no way to disable GC. I'll look into adding one. >>> >
-- Eduardo Bellani omnia mutantur, nihil interit. _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
