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tinygo-org / tinygo

Go compiler for small places. Microcontrollers, WebAssembly (WASM/WASI), and command-line tools. Based on LLVM.
https://tinygo.org
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What kind of GC is `-gc=precise`? #3997

Open vlkv opened 9 months ago

vlkv commented 9 months ago

Hello! There is no info about -gc=precise option on https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/usage/important-options/ page. But such option definitely exists, because of https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/blob/731532cd2b6353b60b443343b51296ec0fafae09/compileopts/options.go#L11

tinygo --help also says not much:

  -gc string
        garbage collector to use (none, leaking, conservative)

Can you please explain what is this kind of GC and what are its pros/cons (compared to 'conservative')?

Thank you.

vlkv commented 3 months ago

Please, can somebody respond?..

aykevl commented 3 months ago

It's almost the same as the conservative GC, but tracks which area of memory definitely aren't pointers. So it has a smaller chance of false positives (which means reduced memory consumption) and may or may not be faster (depending on your use case). It's still mostly conservative, but a bit smarter.

This should really be added to the website.