Hi all,
I have recently been doing some research into Garbage Collectors, and
playing around with CMUCL's GC. Since there has been a lot of
disscussion about Lisp and games in here over the last few months, I
figured I'd continue the trend :)
I read the Naughty Dog Postmortem on Jak and Dexter, about some of the
pros and cons of using Lisp for games (well, GOAL anyways), and I
wondered
a) What type of GC would be the best to use in games? mark-sweep,
generational stop-and-copy, incremental tracing, etc. Would a real-time
GC work?
b) Java is used to write games frequently, and it works ok as far as I
know (coming from limited Java experiance here). Java of course has a
GC. How is Java's GC different from most Lisp GCs? Is it really that
different?
c) Is it possibly to use a non-real-time GC and only GC when the player
is at a menu screen or some such? I mean when you write games in C++
you don't have to worry about GCing (then again you have to declare
everything and clean up your mess), so is it possible not to worry
about GCing frequently in games? Or will you need to because of screen
refreshes etc.?
Just some thoughts and questions. I will probably be compiling all of
these ideas into some sort of essay when I get some of the answers, and
learn a little more about GC algorithms and the like.
--
Certum quod factum.
Philip Haddad