On Mar 21, 2006, at 6:28 AM, Jesus Cea wrote:

> A mark&sweep collector, like the current one in Durus, will need
> memory
> proportional to live objects in the storage. Unless you use disk as
> memory (paging) and pay a big speed tax.

The Durus collector does require disk space proportional to the
number/size
of live objects in the storage.

>
> My current investigation in GC for my BerkeleyDB backend is a cycle
> detector (if no cycles, the reference counters will manage pretty
> well),
> where I only need to consider objects previously linked from modified
> objects, no the total storage... unless an object keeps a reference to
> the root object :-p. That is my nightmare, by the way :p

Can you write a cycle detector that does not require, in the worst
case, space that is proportional to the number of objects?

>
> Garbage Collection is hard.

yes