I think it's pretty clever. The memory fragmentation caused by incessant consing...

jdvh on Jan 6, 2009 | parent | context | favorite | on: newLisp is a Lisp-like, general-purpose scripting ...

I think it's pretty clever. The memory fragmentation caused by incessant consing leads to gc phase after gc phase. Their ORO trick prevents this, and as a bonus improves cache locality. They report they also have a true mark and sweep phase to take care of the corner cases.

Does their ORO scheme have any significant downsides?

eru on Jan 6, 2009 [–]

No sharing. And clever compilers can already allocate most conses on the stack nowadays.