[m-dev.] Re: GC and Mercury

[Thomas Charles CONWAY]

Fergus Henderson, you write:
> > Well, I guess you know my position on Boehm. I do understand it
> > was the way to go whn developing Mercury. If one aims at moving
> > Mercury in the industrial world, I believe that both from a quality
> > and a performance point of view, it is wiser to consider replacement.
> 
> Well, conservative GC is a religious issue, I guess.
> For safety critical software, I'd agree. 
> But it does seems to work pretty well in practice.

I have only very occationaly noticed the pauses for GC in a number
of interactive applications. I've also used Mercury (with the Boehm GC)
for the `soft real time' application of generating MIDI events, and although
the timing irregularities were quite noticable, they were only slight
(the human auditory system is very sensitive to such irregularities -
it is not uncommon to notice a 10ms interval between 2 notes). 

Thomas
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Thomas Conway               				      conway at cs.mu.oz.au
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