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Jim Blandy writes: > In the absence of really exciting new hacks I haven't heard of, Guile > will continue to use conservative GC. The alternatives --- explicitly > marking heap pointers, and reference counting --- are clearly > unacceptable, given Guile's goals. I have direct long-term experience > trying to use the first, and the second doesn't support Scheme's > semantics. I've often wondered whether a combination reference count/mark & sweep collector, that generally freed objects quickly (thanks to reference counting) but periodically found circular structures with marking would be of any use. Frankly, though, Guile has a lot of problems right now, none of which have anything to do with the GC it uses. There's no documentation, it is slow, it doesn't have the sort of interfaces or module system it needs, etc. It isn't a worthy competitor to things like Perl, at least not yet. Once the basic problems are further along, maybe spending time on GC would be good.... Perry