[armedbear-devel] Recovering "special slots" after package deletion

[Alessio Stalla]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 3:21 PM, Alan Ruttenberg
<alanruttenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 5:38 PM, Erik Huelsmann <ehuels at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Since packages can be deleted, symbols be garbage collected.
>> In the current implementation, GC-ing a special symbol will leave the
>> slot it was assigned unused. There's no way the slot gets reassigned,
>> because nothing keeps track of these 'dead' slots. To make matters
>> worse: there may be huge lisp structures referenced in the dead slot,
>> because it's also not cleared out.
>
> Would it not make sense to have delete-package at least clear out the
> relevant values in the array.

No, because symbols are first-class objects, so a given symbol can
continue to be referenced even after its home package has been
deleted.

Bye,
Alessio