Re: Opportunistic GC

[Pip Cet]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 6:22 AM Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>
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>   > I suspect we wouldn't want to use `fork` literally, but rather something
>   > like Linux's `clone` so as to have more control about what is
>   > really shared.
>
> I see a potential problem: maybe not all current or future supported
> platforms have this feature.

Do you mean `fork' or `clone'? If it's the latter, we can just use
`fork' and miss out on a very slight optimization. If you think there
are platforms which don't support an efficient `fork'  (WebAssembly
doesn't; you have to make a full eager copy of the heap yourself) but
where we want to do the `fork' trick anyway, I don't see how. I think
those platforms will just have to continue using synchronous GC.
Which, of course, is not going away: this feature is useful in some
situations, I hope, but it should by no means be mandatory.

Pip