Re: [gobo-eiffel-develop] Memory allocation overhead

[Colin P. A. <co...@co...>]

>>>>> "Lothar" == Lothar Scholz <ll...@we...> writes:


    EB> I just saw that in your last check-in you used MEMORY.free.
    EB> This is a bad idea in my opinion.

Why? I was only using it in places where I could guarantee that the
object wouldn't be used again (not a frequent case).
It can cut down the amount of work needed by the next mark cycle.

    EB> And it won't help anyway
    EB> when using gec+boehm (it's currently implemented as a no-op).

    Lothar> Which GC version are you using? GC_free is implemented in
    Lothar> "malloc.c" and it works fine. I used it starting with 6.7
    Lothar> upto the latest 7.1.beta3-snapshot it was never a no-op.

    Lothar> I'm using it a lot to free large buffers and it helps to
    Lothar> keep memory footprint small. Waiting for a 500 KByte
    Lothar> memory chunk to get freed by a conservative GC is just
    Lothar> extremely risky.

    Lothar> Remember if you using double and real values you might
    Lothar> have a lot of false positives.

But Gobo code has to work with ISE as well as GEC. And Manu warned
that it might fail with ISE, as the C code might continue to hold a
reference to the object. That's why I removed the calls to free.
-- 
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire