Re: The joy of garbage collection

As Alan wrote, it's easiest to just write your Lisp inside Lisp, so you get all the benefits from a good compiler and a performant garbage collector for your language (and for free!).

If you want to experiment with garbage collection, however, I suggest you read some nice papers on memory management from this page:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/oops/papers.html
especially "Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques" and "Dynamic Storage Allocation: A Survey and Critical Review", maybe the second one before the first if you want to know how other memory managers (malloc) are implemented.

To answer your free-list question: it depends how you manage memory. If you get your memory blocks from malloc(), then the GC's sweep-phase should free() the blocks. If you roll your own memory manager on large blocks (that malloc() or some other means provides), then of course you need your own mechanism (such as free-lists) to make sure that that memory is available for future allocation requests.

--
Do or do not.  There is no try.
  Yoda
.

Relevant Pages

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