GC efficiency?

[Kevin Gallagher <Gallagher@gilgamesh.cs.umass.edu>]

After working in MACL for serveral hours garbage collections seem to
happen more and more often.  During that time I've been mostly editing
and haven't been creating too much garbage of my own.  Has anyone else
noticed this?  Is MACL not reclaiming some memory?

One suspect is unreclaimed ObjectLisp objects.  I haven't found any
way to really deallocate an object.  The function license-to-object
will always return the object even if there are no other pointers to
it.  Now, a few objects here and there wouldn't take up too much
memory, but since everything uses objects, the memory could add up.

I suppose there is a table somewhere that you could go into and delete
the entry for that object, but that would only help for objects that I
allocate.  System allocated objects would still be there.

This brings up another question.  When programming menus, is it a good
practice to hide the window after your done rather than close it?
That way you could reuse the same window for subsequent menu calls.

Kevin Gallagher
Gallagher@cs.umass.edu