World: r3wp

one problem with reference counting is cyclical reference.  they 
are hard if even sometimes impossible to collect in some sequences 
of execution.

(generally, reference counting is not a true garbage collection)

cyclical references is a problem with any sort of algoritm.

yeah but for a garbage collector its a major issue.

so, the proper GCs don't count references

I do wonder how it knows that all references have been terminated.

You can understand the whole referencing business as a kind of a 
graph - A refers to B, B refers to C, C refers to A, ...

ok, just read a few papers on current GC techniques (including MS's 
pretty competent algorithm)

anyhow... we are a bit off topic from my original post.    I now 
understand why GC is very slow on large datasets.

but its still possible to get that information, maybe it could be 
a refinement, as well as one for MEM stats (if its also heavy to 
resolve)

but its still possible to get that information,
 - which one, references are not counted

no but traversing the "heap" (which is what I am guessing he is doing) 
he can count all references to a particular item.  and YES it wil 
be slow.  but for debugging it could be EXTREMELY usefull.  even 
more would be returning all the items which the GC has encountered 
which have references)

I do not say reference counting *cannot* be done. I say referece 
counting *is not* implemented.

ah ok  ;-)

(I may be wrong, though)

but, taking into account, that it is not needed (the GC does not 
need to know that), it would be a waste of time/code

There are things I would rather see time spent on than the proposed 
INFO? enhancement.

REBOL isn't heading towards less error triggering as a rule (though 
there may be less in practice); it is headed towards making errors 
trigger on more useful occasions. The principle is that errors are 
your friends, and if they aren't, we need to reevaluate them on a 
case by case basis. In some cases we have made things trigger an 
error in R3 that didn't in R2, with the hope of overall benefits 
in security, stability and debuggability. We even added ASSERT to 
explicitly trigger errors.

In the case of LENGTH? and INDEX?, we are only allowing them to return 
none when passed none, using none as the equivalent of SQL's unknown, 
not N/A. And even those are a bit iffy - we are only planing to allow 
those to have fewer intermediate none checks when doing none pass-through 
on FIND and SELECT return values. However, the disadvantage is that 
errors aren't triggered close enough to the source of the error. 
Hopefully they will be triggered later by ASSERT calls.

My preference would be to not lose the valuable information about 
which values have length and which shouldn't be passed to LENGTH?. 
We definitely don't want too many nones to be propagated to data 
that doesn't expect them; none leaks are tough to track down, which 
is the whole purpose of the unset! type.

maxim I vote for your proposal legth? to return none if the argument 
can't be traversed  could be a test on the type of the tested thing 
but arfter ready your  way to present this I'm kinda convinced ... 
As for the GC discussion I very liked the " it doesn't work like 
this but I don't know anything about how it works" isn't that a mutual 
exclusion ?

Not really. We can determine from testing the ways that it *doesn't* 
work.

We don't know the exact algorithm, but we know a lot about it, and 
that it's proprietary.

that's the kind of high level discussion that should conclude by 
a high level documentation about memory management and gc predictions 
... but probably better wasting the oportunity ... once again. I 
would not ask why?

GC stuff that we can figure out from experimentation and conversations:

- Mark and sweep
- Not generational or copying
- Probably zoned into block and binary/string zones.

Also, Carl has claimed that it is an algorithm that is unique to 
REBOL, though not gone into details.

I think adding a system like generational would be a big benefit 
to REBOL.  my guess is that Carl has a twist on this idea.

it's not the first time we have this discussion years ago we had 
this discussion about GC and memory management it's a cyclic concern 
and a cyclic discussion until we don't DC it :) ( Document & Collect 
it)

and because memory isn't released to the OS very often, I can make 
a fair guess that the GC doesn't compact on collect.

and clearly speaking about guru level stuff and not having a begining 
of a trail on such an issue makes me crazy just because noone wants 
to do this basic effort ...

but the GC can only be speculated to.  so there isn't alot of point 
in documenting assumptions.

anyway GC thing will tend to be less crucial with the default local 
vars in func no ?

unless Carl did a document about it, which would be very nice.  (hint 
hint ... RM-Asset guys?  ;-)

no since the memory allocated by any function still has to be managed 
by some sort of heap, since the data can and often does exist beyond 
the stack.

maxim hum you know you do a splendid documentation full of stupidities 
to make Carl go on verbose mode and correct it that's what it's called 
preach the false to obtain the true :)

that's some inverted spycology ...

spycology... hahaha... typo or not, its a good word.

The main reason that we haven't speculated on it is that it doesn't 
really matter what the real algorithm is, since it's internal and 
can't be swapped. All that matters is externally determinable traits, 
like whether data can move and when. Any moving collector requires 
a lot more effort to work with C libraries and extensions; that includes 
copying and generational collectors.

maxim or not :)

convenient dislexia :)

brianh in fact we had speculate alot of it with steeve and maxim 
around  spring 2009  when we were researching area-tc ... at that 
time i should have done a completly stupid high level documentation 
full of speculations maybe by now we would have better view on this 
particular topic

the extensions API actually marshals all of that so the internals 
of the GC don't really affect the host kit that much.  


A part from the raw image! data, we don't really have any reason 
to believe that any pointer we share with the core is persistent.


In any case I don't rely on it, because AFAIK Carl has insinuated 
that we never really have access to the internals and pointers we 
get are actually interfaces, not interal references (for security 
reasons).

the issue is that the GC does affect my code a lot in big apps and 
I'd like to know exactly when and how it works so I can better guess 
when its about to jerk my code in an animation or while I'm scrolling 
stuff.

exactly when and how it works
 - there are at least two reasons why this is what you can't get:


1) *when* the GC works is "unpredictable" from the programmer's POV 
(depending on other code, etc.)

2) It is (or may be) subject to adjustments or changes, without the 
programmer being able to detect such changes, so why should he know?

3) programming for a specific GC variant should be seen as a typical 
bad practice - why should you want to make code that is supposed 
to work only in specific circumstances? Not to mention, that you 
actually cannot do that anyway, since the GC should be programmed 
to hide any implementation details

As to why I know the GC does not count references: I know it, since 
it is documented widely, that reference counting cannot be used for 
garbage collection in general environments.

Refcounting w/ cycle detection or or a hybrid refcounting + tracing 
approach certainly can.

But in various bits and pieces of REBOL documentation it's hinted 
at that the REBOL GC being a tracing mark-sweep variant. And I seem 
to recall that Carl affirmed this at least once, but I don't have 
any link to the source handy.

I think it is safe to consider REBOL GC to be mark&sweep. But am 
totally at odds, how that can help Max write any of his code.

this is just helpfull for debugging.   its very usefull to track 
down memory leaks, which are pretty easy to create in GC systems 
since we don't manage any part of it.