Deprecate the garbage collector?

[dcreager]

Is anyone using the garbage collector? I've never used it in anger, and to be honest, I'm not sure if it belongs in this kind of low-level library. If not, I'd like to remove it before cutting a stable 1.0.0 release.

My 2c on this as a huge fan of this library: I really like the idea of the garbage collector, however things get complicated by the fact that it's not thread-safe, which means having a collector per-thread and preventing any sharing of objects across threads. If the collector was thread safe, there would be a significant advantage to its existence over memory pools, which is that it would massively simplify shared ownership of heap objects.

If you're doing shared ownership with objects allocated from a memory pool, you basically have to ensure architecturally that an object is returned to the pool at the correct time. With the garbage collector however, it'll just happen as soon as all the references are cleared, which is very useful. Doing multi-threaded GC is tricky though, and I can imagine it's not particularly feasible for a library like this.

[solvingj]

If you do remove it, maybe you could verify compatibility, and add some integration tests, and maybe an example or two using:

https://github.com/ivmai/bdwgc/