[MUD-Dev] [Tech] Garbage collection

[Bruce Mitchener]

Brian Hook wrote:

> I've been doing some more research into garbage collection lately
> and I'm trying to get a feel for what the current major MUD
> languages/engines use for garbage collection.

> My gut instinct is that a vanilla mark-and-sweep probably isn't
> acceptable because of hitches, so either most are using explicit
> memory management (doubtful), ref-counting (likely), or an
> incremental collector (complicated).

In Cold, we mainly used ref-counting.  It works pretty well,
especially with a test suite for most of the language and the
ability to run it under Purify and/or Valgrind.

There are some licensable garbage collectors as well.  One nice
looking one has a viral open source license, but can commercially
licensed as well:

   http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/

Since I know that you've been looking at TOM
(http://www.gerbil.org/tom/) some, it has an incremental garbage
collector in its runtime that is pretty nice.

I've been looking at Chicken Scheme
(http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/chicken.html) some
off and on, and it has a generational collector .. but it uses the C
stack as its nursery.

I think the Boehm GC can do incremental collection.

A tool that is pretty nice when working with a garbage collected
system is GCspy:

   http://www.experimentalstuff.com/Technologies/GCspy/

  - Bruce
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