Re: [MIT-Scheme-devel] primitives, interrupts, allocation, and robustness

[Taylor R Campbell]

   Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:28:25 -0700
   From: Joe Marshall <address@hidden>

   > Whenever a primitive wants to allocate n words on the heap, it checks
   > whether n words are available.  If not, it requests n words from the
   > garbage collector and backs out to let the garbage collector run.  If
   > the garbage collector frees n words, Scheme restarts the primitive;
   > otherwise, Scheme aborts to the nearest REPL and tells you that it's
   > out of memory.

   Another solution is to simply punt:  if out of memory, don't try to GC,
   just abort to nearest.  (There are good engineering reasons to do it
   this way, actually.)

Er...  Then the GC would never run.  Maybe you were referring to
something else?  Secondary GC daemons?