[#33161] Call/CC and Ruby iterators. — olczyk@... (Thaddeus L Olczyk)

Reading about call/cc in Scheme I get the impression that it is very

11 messages 2002/02/05

[#33242] favicon.ico — Dave Thomas <Dave@...>

19 messages 2002/02/06
[#33256] Re: favicon.ico — Leon Torres <leon@...> 2002/02/06

[#33435] Reg: tiny contest: who's faster? (add_a_gram) — grady@... (Steven Grady)

> My current solution works correctly with various inputs.

17 messages 2002/02/08

[#33500] Ruby Embedded Documentation — William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@...>

Hi,

24 messages 2002/02/10
[#33502] Re: Ruby Embedded Documentation — "Lyle Johnson" <ljohnson@...> 2002/02/10

> Now, I am using Ruby on Linux, and I have downloaded Ruby version

[#33615] Name resolution in Ruby — stern@... (Alan Stern)

I've been struggling to understand how name resolution is supposed to

16 messages 2002/02/11

[#33617] choice of HTML templating system — Paul Brannan <paul@...>

I am not a web developer, nor do I pretend to be one.

23 messages 2002/02/11

[#33619] make first letter lowercase — sebi@... (sebi)

hello,

20 messages 2002/02/11
[#33620] Re: [newbie] make first letter lowercase — Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@...> 2002/02/11

sebi wrote:

[#33624] Re: [newbie] make first letter lowercase — "Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan" <jeffp@...> 2002/02/11

On Feb 11, Tobias Reif said:

[#33632] Re: [newbie] make first letter lowercase — Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...> 2002/02/12

[#33731] simple XML parsing (greedy / non-greedy — Ron Jeffries <ronjeffries@...>

Suppose I had this text

14 messages 2002/02/13

[#33743] qualms about respond_to? idiom — David Alan Black <dblack@...>

Hi --

28 messages 2002/02/13
[#33751] Re: qualms about respond_to? idiom — Dave Thomas <Dave@...> 2002/02/13

David Alan Black <dblack@candle.superlink.net> writes:

[#33754] Re: qualms about respond_to? idiom — David Alan Black <dblack@...> 2002/02/13

Hi --

[#33848] "Powered by Ruby" banner — Yuri Leikind <YuriLeikind@...>

Hello Ruby folks,

78 messages 2002/02/14
[#33909] Re: "Powered by Ruby" banner — Leon Torres <leon@...> 2002/02/14

On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Yuri Leikind wrote:

[#33916] RE: "Powered by Ruby" banner — "Jack Dempsey" <dempsejn@...> 2002/02/15

A modest submission:

[#33929] Re: "Powered by Ruby" banner — yet another bill smith <bigbill.smith@...> 2002/02/15

Kent Dahl wrote:

[#33932] OT Netscape 4.x? was Re: "Powered by Ruby" banner — Chris Gehlker <gehlker@...> 2002/02/15

On 2/15/02 5:54 AM, "yet another bill smith" <bigbill.smith@verizon.net>

[#33933] RE: OT Netscape 4.x? was Re: "Powered by Ruby" banner — "Jack Dempsey" <dempsejn@...> 2002/02/15

i just don't understand why it didn't show up! dhtml/javascript, ok, but a

[#33937] Re: OT Netscape 4.x? was Re: "Powered by Ruby" banner — Chris Gehlker <gehlker@...> 2002/02/15

On 2/15/02 7:16 AM, "Jack Dempsey" <dempsejn@georgetown.edu> wrote:

[#33989] Re: OT OmniWeb [was: Netscape 4.x?] — Sean Russell <ser@...> 2002/02/16

Chris Gehlker wrote:

[#33991] Re: OT OmniWeb [was: Netscape 4.x?] — Rob Partington <rjp@...> 2002/02/16

In message <3c6e5e01_1@spamkiller.newsgroups.com>,

[#33993] Re: OT OmniWeb [was: Netscape 4.x?] — Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@...> 2002/02/16

* Rob Partington (rjp@browser.org) wrote:

[#33925] Re: "Powered by Ruby" banner — Martin Maciaszek <mmaciaszek@...> 2002/02/15

In article <3C6CFCCA.5AD5CA67@scnsoft.com>, Yuri Leikind wrote:

[#33956] Re: "Powered by Ruby" banner — Leon Torres <leon@...> 2002/02/15

On Fri, 15 Feb 2002, Martin Maciaszek wrote:

[#33851] Ruby and .NET — Patrik Sundberg <ps@...>

I have been reading a bit about .NET for the last couple of days and must say

53 messages 2002/02/14

[#34024] Compiled companion language for Ruby? — Erik Terpstra <erik@...>

Hmmm, seems that my previous post was in a different thread, I'll try

12 messages 2002/02/16

[#34036] The GUI Returns — "Horacio Lopez" <vruz@...>

Hello all,

33 messages 2002/02/17

[#34162] Epic4/Ruby — Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@...>

Rejoice, for you no longer have to put up with that evil excuse for a

34 messages 2002/02/18

[#34185] Operator overloading and multiple arguments — ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)

I'm trying to overload the '<=' operator in a class in order to use it for

10 messages 2002/02/18

[#34217] Ruby for web development — beripome@... (Billy)

Hi all,

21 messages 2002/02/19

[#34350] FAQ for comp.lang.ruby — "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>

RUBY NEWSGROUP FAQ -- Welcome to comp.lang.ruby! (Revised 2001-2-18)

15 messages 2002/02/20

[#34375] Setting the Ruby continued — <jostein.berntsen@...>

Hi,

24 messages 2002/02/20
[#34384] Re: Setting the Ruby continued — Paulo Schreiner <paulo@...> 2002/02/20

Also VERY important:

[#34467] recursive require — Ron Jeffries <ronjeffries@...>

I'm having a really odd thing happen with two files that mutually

18 messages 2002/02/21

[#34503] special characters — Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@...>

Hi all,

13 messages 2002/02/22

[#34517] Windows Installer Ruby 166-0 available — Andrew Hunt <andy@...>

16 messages 2002/02/22

[#34597] rdoc/xml questions — Dave Thomas <Dave@...>

24 messages 2002/02/23

[#34631] Object/Memory Management — "Sean O'Dell" <sean@...>

I'm new to Ruby and the community here (I've been learning Ruby for a grand

44 messages 2002/02/23

[#34682] duplicate method name — Ron Jeffries <ronjeffries@...>

I just found a case in a test file where i had two tests of the same

16 messages 2002/02/24
[#34687] Re: duplicate method name — s@... (Stefan Schmiedl) 2002/02/24

Hi Ron.

[#34791] Style Question — Ron Jeffries <ronjeffries@...>

So I'm building this set theory library. The "only" object is supposed

13 messages 2002/02/25

[#34912] RCR?: parallel to until: as_soon_as — Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@...>

Hi,

18 messages 2002/02/26

[#34972] OT A Question on work styles — Chris Gehlker <gehlker@...>

As a Mac baby I just had to step through ruby in GDB *from the command line*

20 messages 2002/02/28

[#35015] Time Comparison — "Sean O'Dell" <sean@...>

I am using the time object to compare times between two files and I'm

21 messages 2002/02/28

Re: Object/Memory Management

From: Sean Middleditch <elanthis@...>
Date: 2002-02-23 19:17:19 UTC
List: ruby-talk #34634
On Sat, 2002-02-23 at 14:01, Sean O'Dell wrote:
> I'm new to Ruby and the community here (I've been learning Ruby for a grand
> total of 2 days now), so forgive me if this has already been beaten to
> death.  I have already read a lot of the archives, but I don't know what's
> being done regarding the garbage collection scheme and the lack of a true
> object destructor.
> 
> Isn't there a way we can *explicitly* destroy objects?  I like to keep
> things tight and clean in my code, and simply walking away from objects I've
> created absolutely freaks me out.  I don't like leaving my program bloated
> up in memory with objects that I really only meant to exist for just a split
> second while it did something.

You can call the GC routines to do cleanup at any time you want.

> 
> I sort of understand (just from reading the archived threads on Usenet and
> the wee bit I found in the pragmatic programmer, developers guide and
> nutshell) how garbage collection works and why it's there.  How hard is it
> to change it to allow the destruction of individual objects?  I think the
> problem is that, since reference counting sort of screws with some of Ruby's
> paradigms, it's not practical to do stack-based cleanup.  That's fine, I see
> the advantage of garbage collection.  However, what about explicit object
> destruction?  That shouldn't mess with anything.  If you can walk the
> current list of living objects to determine if one can go away, why can't
> there be a call to explicitly check and destroy one object?  Perhaps throw
> an exception if it can't go away yet, to let the programming know during
> debugging that he needs to move to call somewhere else.

I'm assuming that you want the memory usage low for
performance/efficiency reasons?  If so, realize that GC is *faster* than
explicit garbage collection... the memory management is only done when
its needed, plus is reduces the amount of tiem spent
allocating/deallocating memory (which is quite slow).

I don't see reference counting ever being added to Ruby, simply because
reference counting breaks way too easy.  With reference counting, almost
any major program is guaranteed to end up with a memory leak (objects
that reference each other, but by nothing else, will never get cleaned
out of memory).

The reason explicit object destruction can't work is because the
interpreter has no idea what objects reference the object you are
destroying.  You could very easily cause dangling pointers, and then a
crash not too long afterwards.  The best thing to do is, after you are
sure you want the object destroyed, call the GC routines.  That will
clean up the object, but *only* if it isn't referenced by anything.

As for the exception idea you mentioned, that would more or less just be
calling the GC, but then marking whether a particular object is gone or
not.  You could get the error that your program needs to unref the
object from somewhere else, but what advantage would that be?

> 
> Also, a related issue...why isn't there a finalize call?  I don't mean the
> finalizer where you can set a method to get called after an object is gone,
> I mean, why isn't there a call to an object's "def finalize...end" right
> *before* an object goes away?  Is that in the works or is that just not the
> Ruby way?
> 
> I don't fully understand why explicit object destruction doesn't exist and
> why there is no object finalize call.  Is it against Ruby philosophy and
> will never be there, or is it just that Ruby is still young and it hasn't
> been implemented yet?
> 
>     Sean
> 
> 


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