[Python-3000] Delayed reference counting idea

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> writes:

>> Why do you want to free memory at a particular point of time?
>
> I don't. However, I *do* want it freed by the time I need it again,

As I said, the rate of GC depends on the rate of allocation.
Unreachable objects are collected when memory is needed for
allocation.

> and I *don't* want unpredictable pauses to catch up on backed-up
> memory-freeing,

Incremental GC (e.g. in OCaml) has short pauses. It doesn't scan all
memory at once, but distributes the work among GC cycles.

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak at knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/