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Re: Tracing garbage collectors are broken

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Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> writes:
> On Tue, 03 May 2011 12:28:41 +0100, Rainer Weikusat wrote:
>> because the rely on the assumption
>
> The only false assumption here is that stand-alone garbage collectors are
> a fire-and-forget magic bullet.

I didn't write anything specifically about 'stand-alone garbage
collectors'. That's actually a different animal altogether, because a
'stand-alone garbage collector' is something somebody choses to use in
some particular application, meaning, it's based on a tradeoff, "I
want feature XYZ and if this means I lose feature ZYX, so be
it". In my opinion, that's not a particularly wise descision which
strongly hints at the fact that someone is using the wrong language to
solve a particular problem but that's just my opinion.

Matters are different, however, if a runtime environment is to be used
by someone and the descision that 'feature such-and-such must not be
used' (because doing breaks does my very politically correctly
automatic memory management scheme) was made by someone else (whose
problem usually isn't to 'make something work in practice' but 'chase
the beautiful butterflies of theory on the alldays sunny meadow of
imagination'), eg, to name the culprit, Perl6.

[...]

> i.e. you ensure that any pointers to the memory which they manage
> are reachable via the defined mechanisms. If you "hide" any part of
> the chain, you lose.

If the garbage collector cannot actually inspect all of the
addressable space used by a particular program, it loses: It cannot
possibly do its job properly without help from application programmers
even if these are proactively put into a straitjacket for the benefit
of the beautiful, hypothetical butterflies.

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Thread

Tracing garbage collectors are broken Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mssgmbh.com> - 2011-05-03 12:28 +0100
  Re: Tracing garbage collectors are broken Michael Press <rubrum@pacbell.net> - 2011-05-03 20:58 -0700
  Re: Tracing garbage collectors are broken gordonb.nw5lc@burditt.org (Gordon Burditt) - 2011-05-04 01:58 -0500
  Re: Tracing garbage collectors are broken Richard Kettlewell <rjk@greenend.org.uk> - 2011-05-04 09:33 +0100
    Re: Tracing garbage collectors are broken Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mssgmbh.com> - 2011-05-04 15:09 +0100
  Re: Tracing garbage collectors are broken Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2011-05-05 08:42 +0100
    Re: Tracing garbage collectors are broken Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mssgmbh.com> - 2011-05-05 11:52 +0100
      Re: Tracing garbage collectors are broken William Ahern <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2011-05-05 11:46 -0700
        Re: Tracing garbage collectors are broken Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@mssgmbh.com> - 2011-05-05 20:41 +0100

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