Incremental Garbage Collector in PyPy | Hacker News Reader

Incremental Garbage Collector in PyPy

morepypy.blogspot.com

114 pointsfijal7 comments

Impressive work!

Aside: Please never rely on your users being able to tell which colour is which on a graph. Use a different dashing or something.

eh sorry, fair point. you can guess from the text that the best one is cpython, the two other are not that different anyway ;-)

I'm not colourblind so it didn't affect me, but as a general rule a large number of your readers will be so it's really worth tweaking your standard graphs a bit.

It was fairly obvious, but I kinda feel the need to point this out whenever it's happening :)

Thanks for the impressive work! It was hard to dive into "details" paragraphs from fast reading, maybe second try will give more understanding.

As an additional question: are there any more details about Raspberry Pi Foundation collaboration? I mean, are there specific projects / codebases they're interested in using PyPy, or was just general donation as a project that should fit well?

as mentioned on the PyPy blog, Raspberry Pi Foundation sponsored partly the ARM port as well as the incremental GC. The reason (as far as I understand) is that PyPy on RPI would provide a fast Python for development of various things, like games.

Great! Very good news for a wide range of applications. It sounds like it was done in a very elegant way as well. Congrats :)

Is it possible to call the garbage collection at a certain time? For games, a common place to do these book keeping tasks is when the app is blocking on vsync screen refresh. Or even when the main action has finished. Say between levels in games, or at the end of an animation, or when waiting for a triggered event to happen (say for robots in a factory). Other real time systems do GC in other threads... so maybe this could be a win for pypy too?

Is JIT a similar thing? Does that cause pauses too?

> Is it possible to call the garbage collection at a certain time?

     import gc; gc.collect()

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