Re: GC leak?

Jerry James writes: That's a good way to convince me to do the opposite. (Sorry, couldn't resist taking a poke at Java. :-) Seriously, nor does Scheme AFAIK. In theory all Scheme objects are eternal, but you can GC their memory images in a process if there are no remaining references to them. You don't have to. True. However, in many cases we do have external resources needing finalization (databases and network connections need closing, fds need flushing, etc), and if we allow the finalizers to do that work and guarantee that finalizers get run before a normal exit, there's that much less work that application programmers need to do. How do Java and RnRS treat such external objects that need finalization? Surely we can come up with a way to tag certain classes as having "important" finalizers in that sense, and guarantee that they be run even at exit. (Isn't there a class of LRECORD_WITHOUT_FINALIZER already?) Or we could separate finalization into a two stage process, the first stage finalizes external resources, and is always done. The second stage finalizes resources that the OS would clean up for us at shutdown, and can be omitted at shutdown. But such omission is an optimization; it can wait if necessary. People who are in a hurry for a given instance to start and stop can run XEmacs as a server process and do all their editing via gnuclient. (Really, XEmacs proper should have no UI; all UIs should be clients of the editor. :-) IMO guaranteed finalization except for objects that we decide don't need it is best. How about #if !defined(XEMACS_HAS_OPTIMIZED_FINALIZATION_MODEL) || DEBUG_XEMACS /* code that guarantees finalization */ #endif If you really are a speed demon feel free to add the null finalization model and #define XEMACS_HAS_OPTIMIZED_FINALIZATION_MODEL in config.h by hand. :-) _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta