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[Chicken-users] Does Chicken garbage collect unreferenced symbols?


From: John Cowan
Subject: [Chicken-users] Does Chicken garbage collect unreferenced symbols?
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 18:43:30 -0400
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11)

Scheme 48 (and thus scsh) do, MIT Scheme does not.  I don't know about
other current Schemes.  Common Lisps can't, because each interned
symbol is preserved in its package and all packages are preserved
in the package registry, an implementation-specific data structure.
(Symbols and packages can be uninterned and unregistered.)  But Scheme
has nothing like those.

If symbols aren't gc'd now, I'd like to argue for them to be.  In an
application I'm writing, I want to generate lots of random symbols at
runtime so they can be looked up more quickly in a-lists, but I don't
necessarily want them hanging around forever.

-- 
John Cowan  <address@hidden>  http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.
                --Albert Einstein




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