# Re: [stack] GC Redux

## Martin Young — 2000-09-07 18:39:01

    About this "no gc required" stuff...

    I haven't read Henry Baker's papers on the subject but I have just had a quick

    look at a couple of the abstracts.  He seems to be suggesting that you don't

    need garbage collection if all your objects are used exactly once each i.e.

    everything is by-value: there are no references.  This is trivially obvious.  I

    presume he has more to say, for which I should actually read the papers.

    Can a Joy-like language be sensibly built using this scheme?  Does the

    existance of dup not make it rather inefficient?

    Given a word "print" which outputs a list of integers as character codes:

    print == [ dup [] = not ] [ uncons emit ] while

    It duplicates the string for each test.

    If one is forced to implement dup without sharing (i.e. one use for each

    object) we'd be doing alot of data copying.

    Puzzled.

    --

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