"Brett" == Brett Gilio <address@hidden> writes:
Brett> I was wondering of this, myself. Is the garbage collector
of
Brett> emacs lisp similar to the Boehm collector style of Guile?
Does
Brett> anybody have any information to pass along on the emacs
lisp GC?
The Emacs GC is a fairly ordinary mark/sweep GC. I'd say it is
nearly
the most straightforward garbage collector you could imagine; or
at
least started that way before features like weak hash maps and
finalizers were added :)
It is vaguely similar to the Boehm GC. The Boehm GC is best
known for
doing conservative marking (but it has several modes and isn't
limited
to this); whereas the Emacs GC conservatively marks the stack
but not
the heap.
If you want to learn more about the Emacs GC in particular,
alloc.c is
not that hard to read. Start with the function
garbage_collect_1.
If you need some background in garbage collection in general,
the Jones
& Lins book "Garbage Collection" is very good.
Tom