🚀 go-pugleaf

re: So I still claim having an explicit free (or at least
    some amount of low-level control on memory allocation, WHEN NEEDED AND
    APPROPRIATE) would be 'a good thing'.

Quite true.  For just this reason, many vendors -- Symbolics and Lucid
included -- supply an explicit RESOURCE management facility (but this
isn't part of the ANSI proposal.)

Ususally, however, the issue for explicit RESOURCE's isn't efficiency of 
GC or whatnot, but rather the pressing need to avoid invoking a potentially
heavyweight(**) GC at an inopportune time --  "Cons-free coding".

I think someone else earlier brought this up too.


-- JonL --



(**)  Statistically, speaking, the "ephemeral" scavenges will do the work
      "most" of the time; but ocasionally they may trigger an ordinary
      dynamic GC, which is not constant-bounded the way an "ephemeral"
      scavenge is; the time required for this kind of regular GC typically
      depends linearly upon the total size of the live data.