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Thoughts on the conservative garbage collector? How often is it a problem?

• RX14 10y ago
  Crystal uses libgc, from the readme: [0] "Since the collector does not require pointers to be tagged, it does not attempt to ensure that all inaccessible storage is reclaimed. However, in our experience, it is typically more successful at reclaiming unused memory than most C programs using explicit deallocation. Unlike manually introduced leaks, the amount of unreclaimed memory typically stays bounded." Having used the language for a year, I've never really had an issue with the gc other than with really large (think 100mb+),infrequrnt, single allocations which get "stuck" and don't get returned to the OS after. This is a by product of the gc being unable to move objects to compact the heap. This situation can usually be rectified by loading a large file as a stream instead of loading it all into memory. Crystal has excellent tools for working with streams (see IO module) however, so it's not that big of a deal.