News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Reference count, don't garbage collect. Parent comment

Re:Reference count, don't garbage collect by aaaaaaaaaaab on Saturday July 30, 2022 @05:19AM (#32285413)
On any OS which is not hard realtime, there could be arbitrary pauses with any syscall. This is just nitpicking.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reference count, don't garbage collect by dento on Saturday July 30, 2022 @05:57AM (#32285544)
Nitpicking: arbitrary pauses can occur even without syscalls, when the OS preempts the program.

More nitpicking: on x86-64, SMI interrupts can cause arbitrary pauses even without any software control involved. Hard realtime on x86-64 is not possible.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reference count, don't garbage collect by staticassertion on Saturday July 30, 2022 @06:14AM (#32285605)
More nitpicking: Your computer might turn off, cosmic rays might blow fuck up your RAM/CPU, Capital G God could reach down and pause the system, there's a universal quantum pause every 5.391247 × 10^-44 so that the universe can reboot, etc etc etc

Orrrrr, GC pause just means pauses caused by the GC as part of its implementation's work to manage memory.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reference count, don't garbage collect by naasking on Sunday July 31, 2022 @03:19PM (#32297987)
This is not nitpicking. The OP was implying they were using alloc/free in their GC. Those calls can be doing all sorts of book keeping behind the scenes, including cascading destructor calls which could free a chain of objects the size of live memory. Suffice it to say, that would pause.
[ Parent | on HN ]