[elephant-devel] db gc

[Ben]

Writing the GC is long overdue.  There are some technical issues with
this which have yet to be solved, actually.  In the first pass, it
will probably require taking the store off-line and running a separate
gc program on it -- that shouldn't be too hard.  it may be possible to
write an online collector but as of yet i don't know how to do it.  i
expect the gc will come with the next release (in a month or so --
after i'm done teaching this quarter!)

you're right, the root should have a setf expander.  i was lazy when i
was cobbling together those convenience functions.  will do for the
next release.  btrees have a setf expander, i think, and the root is a
btree, so if you want you can get the root slot-value from the store
directly and use the expanders that way.

thanks for your comments.  i'm sorry i keep telling people "wait till
the next release" but we really are too busy right now to work on this
stuff.  it WILL happen though, i promise.  (if people want to help us,
that would be great too!)

take care, B

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Gabor Melis wrote:

> Hello
>
> Currently I am investigating the possibility of replacing  a cl-sql backend in
> a very simple web application after getting more and more dissatisfied with
> the abstraction level of that solution. I stumbled into elephant and it looks
> very nice.
>
> However, one of my toy tests that adds a lot of instances of a simple
> persistent clos class to root repeatedly (to the same key) seems to make
> %ELEPHANT grow and grow. I suspect the slot values don't get "garbage
> collected" as hinted by a note in:
>
> http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/doc/The-Root.html
>
> Is that so? Is there a workaround?
>
> Cheers, Gábor Melis
>
> PS: One more thing that's been bothering me: is there a reason for add-to-root
> and get-from-root not following the more conventional/lispy root-value + setf
> approach?
>
> _______________________________________________
> elephant-devel site list
> elephant-devel at common-lisp.net
> http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/elephant-devel
>