jstern / foshay.citilink.com (Josh Stern) writes:

> Has there been any public discussion of a new GC strategy?  I'm
> not any kind of expert, but my understanding is that 'generational'
> generically refers to methods for amortizing GC usage over time 
> rather than to any algorithmic speedup in the overall time spent 
> doing GC.  The amortizing would help, say, the responsiveness of
> a user interface, but not a benchmark.

There's more to it than that. Languages such as Ruby that
introduce many short lived objects. If you can keep them in a separate 
pool, then the linear search of all objects during the mark phase is
significantly shorter. As you search the short-term pool more
frequently than the long term pool, you actually save overall CPU,
rather than just defer the pain.


Dave