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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker)
Subject: Re: Reference Counting (was Re: Searching Method for Incremental Garbage Collection)
Message-ID: <hbakerD026Cv.Gnv@netcom.com>
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References: <3bdd2v$ckg@larry.rice.edu> <3be2pd$b1p@nntp.crl.com> <3bg1jg$50o@news.parc.xerox.com>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 02:17:19 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.c:118403 comp.lang.c++:100917 comp.lang.lisp:15860

In article <3bg1jg$50o@news.parc.xerox.com> boehm@parc.xerox.com (Hans Boehm) writes:
>I distribute a calculator utility that performs demand driven evaluation
>of real numbers, and (for large calculations) does quite a bit of
>allocation.  It uses a stop-and-mark collector.  I don't think I've
>ever noticed a GC pause.  Certainly nobody else has ever complained
>about GC pauses either.  (It could now use the incremental version
>of the collector, but I don't think I ever bothered to turn it on.)
>
>Why are the pauses not noticable?

Because you don't print a message "garbage collecting, please wait...".

The only reason why people complain about GC in Emacs, is because
Emacs keeps telling them that it's collecting garbage.  Similar
collections occur inside of various word processing and spreadsheet
programs, but those programmers (or their companies) are careful not
to tell the user when this happens.  The net result is that the same
pauses occur, but the users chalk it up to disk or network traffic.

Your refrigerator rarely tells you that its doing a defrost cycle, so
why should programs advertise that they are doing garbage
collections????

Henry Baker
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