[racket] Garbage collection in Racket

On 07/22/2012 04:43 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>
> On Jul 22, 2012, at 4:21 PM, Harry Spier wrote:
>
>> 1) If [some memory is no longer being referred to], does that always ensure that doing a (collect-garbage) will reclaim the memory?
>
> Garbage collection may retrieve all memory that can provably not affect the future of a program execution. Existing garbage collectors perceive all of memory as a graph and traverse it, starting from a set of roots (e.g., stack, registers). If they can reach a chunk of memory, the corresponding data stays available; otherwise, it is made available fir future allocations.

Harry: "may" is an important word. I wouldn't write a program whose 
correct operation depends on unreachable memory being reclaimed on the 
next collection cycle. (It's possible to write a program like that using 
finalizers, but you probably weren't planning to. :D) Many kinds of 
collectors don't guarantee it.

"Conservative" collectors can't even guarantee that any memory will ever 
be reclaimed, though on average they reclaim almost all of it.

>> 2) What triggers automatic garbage collection.
>
> Any attempt to allocate memory that does not find enough available memory: cons, struct construction, lambda, etc.

Don't count on this, either. IIUC, it can be better for collection 
cycles to be triggered under different criteria. Racket's might change 
in the future.

Neil ⊥