Re: Python's GC approach

[Paul Prescod <address@hidden>]

Has anyone used the Boehm collector on multiple platforms in a
multithreaded, embed-able interpreted language?

> There are
> customizations galore in the Boehm GC that allow you to give it extra
> information about what you are doing, so if you are in the position of
> having complete knowledge about memory usage you ought to be able to
> avoid many of the problems you noted above.  At the worst, you'd end
> up writing your own GC.

Writing your own GC seems easier than figuring out every bell and
whistle to get Boehm working on every platform, in every configuration,
with every third-party library and embedding application! Now that
Python's GC is done I don't think that we ever have to really worry
about "porting" it to a new platform or about conflicts with third party
libraries. That seems simpler in the long run than using Boehm!

 Paul Prescod