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1122 :: About the Nim Garbage Collector

• lightk (orginal) [2015-04-12T15:16:50+02:00] view original

  Hi,

  I'm interested in knowing about Nim's garbage collector.

  Does the garbage collector run as a seperate system process and will it be invoked at regular intervals. Does the generated C code have to satisfy certain conditions to allow itself to be garbage collected ?

  Can you please elaborate on it ? P.S I did read about the Nim garbage collector in the docs online.

  Thank you

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• def (orginal) [2015-04-12T15:26:07+02:00] view original

  The GC runs inside each thread, not in a separate thread. It only runs when new GC memory is allocated.

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• Varriount (orginal) [2015-04-12T16:37:45+02:00] view original

  Is there anything specific you want to know?

  If you look at the documentation page, you'll find a page on the garbage collector with some general information on Nim's default garbage collection backend.

  Aside from the default backend for the garbage collector, there are also mark-and-sweep and boehm backends.

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• lightk (orginal) [2015-04-12T17:24:33+02:00] view original

  Let's say I'm writing some c program. I want to leverage Nim's garbage collector, how do I do it ? Do I have to make any call to GC or how do i make my C program Nim GC compatible ?

  Thanks a lot for your replies def and Varriount :)

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• Varriount (orginal) [2015-04-12T18:55:19+02:00] view original

  Well, the garbage collector is really only designed to work on objects created from Nim. You can pass pointers from objects managed by Nim's garbage collector to C, and the C code can call the manual 'increment refcount'/'decrement refcount' procedures.

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