Re: Failing to GC killed buffers considered harmful

[Pip Cet]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 7:12 PM Daniel Colascione <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 3/29/20 12:07 PM, Pip Cet wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 6:48 PM Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> > The call to garbage_collect in Fdump_emacs_portable doesn't actually
> > reduce image size.
>
> It runs finalizers, which can free additional memory.

Indeed; it can also remove entries from weak hash tables, collect
markers, and collect buffers which would otherwise be dumped. In
practice, though, none of that appears to happen in a standard dump,
at least not to the point where image size is affected. And none of
that can happen predictably with conservative garbage collection.

We could make garbage collection predictable in this one case, by not
marking the stack and making dump-emacs-portable a noreturn function.
I don't think we should.