[MacRuby-devel] MacRuby and ARC was: Advice for Total Tyro

Conrad Taylor conradwt at gmail.com
Mon Oct 17 16:36:14 PDT 2011



Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 17, 2011, at 2:26 PM, Igor Evsukov <igor.evsukov at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Henry,
> 
>> This doesn't explain why MacRuby can't be implemented with ARC rather than relying on the OBJ-C 2 garbage collector.
> Do You know what the difference between Garbage Collection and Reference Counting?
> 

Igor, ARC happens at compile time not runtime.  This feature is implemented in the Objective-C runtime.

-Conrad

> Current MacRuby VM implementation heavily depends on presence of GC. Potentially You could modify it to use ARC instead. The question is how much time do you need to spent on it and how you plan to support C extensions? 
> 
> Again, please, watch the end of Joshua Ballanco talk at BostonRB ( http://bostonrb.org/presentations/macruby-what-is-it-and-why-should-i-care-part-1 ) when he talk about issues of porting MacRuby to iOS. It isn't an issue to move MacRuby to it's own GC, there even was some efforts to do it https://github.com/takuma104/iphone-macruby 
> 
> On 17 окт. 2011, at 23:28, Henry Maddocks wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 17/10/2011, at 7:11 PM, Igor Evsukov wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi Henry,
>>> 
>>>>> And it's impossible to make Ruby to use ARC.
>>>> 
>>>> Why?
>>> For memory management Objective-C uses a paradigm called "reference counting". 
>> 
>> ...
>> 
>>> In Ruby we have garbage collector which is acts in whole different way 
>> 
>> I understand all this. But I'm not asking about _Ruby_, I'm asking about the MacRuby OBJ-C implementation of the Ruby language.
>> 
>>> So, basically, ARC and GC are two conceptually different things which are even not replaceable by each other(circular references).
>> 
>> This doesn't explain why MacRuby can't be implemented with ARC rather than relying on the OBJ-C 2 garbage collector.
>> 
>> Henry
>> 
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> 
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