[armedbear-devel] (lisp) Stack management efficiency

[Ville Voutilainen]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 2:23 PM, Erik Huelsmann<ehuels at gmail.com> wrote:
>> How many frames will then hang around? If I make a deep call, and never
>> do another deep call, will I then have frames lurking around from the deep
>> call?
> In the current implementation: yes. However, with this improvement,
> there's probably some room for keeping a very small statistic of some
> kind which would allow building a shorter list of stack frames (ie
> dispose of all / a few). Ofcourse, that would undo some of the
> performance gain.
> Do you have ideas? I thought to use a weak reference, meaning GC will
> collect the memory if it needs it, but other than that, I certainly
> think setting an upperbound won't fix the "keep hanging around" issue.

I don't have a detailed implementation idea in mind, but on the general level,
the stack-frame cache should be

1) per-thread (in order to avoid synchronisation overhead)
2) chunked-allocated (set aside a bunch, when all are unwound, remove
a chunk, before that, mark them unused for re-use)

I don't yet know what would be a proper data structure for 2).