[ENH] Add 'chase pointers' (PointerFinder) to inspector menu

Doug Way dway at riskmetrics.com
Wed Feb 14 05:49:31 UTC 2001


Bob Arning wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Feb 2001 02:24:49 -0500 Doug Way <dway at riskmetrics.com> wrote:
> >(By the way, I think I've run across a reproducible case in which the PointerFinder comes up empty on an object inspected via allInstances.  Are there known limitations, or should I report this as a bug in the PointerFinder?  (Or could the PointerFinder be revealing a bug in the garbage collector? ;-) ;-) )
>
> Doug,
>
> The use of #allInstances is one to be careful about. It can return objects which are no longer reachable, but which have not yet been garbage collected. When you want to enumerate reachable instances, do a full garbage collection first.

Ah, you're right.  Somehow I thought that "Smalltalk garbageCollect" would be the same as the periodic (incremental?) garbage collecting, and that the full collect was called globalGC or something, which I couldn't find (I must have been thinking of VisualWorks).  Now I see that #garbageCollect is indeed the
full collection, and I'm guessing garbageCollectMost is called during the periodic collecting.  With the reproducible case I had above, the objects did dissappear after a full garbageCollect, so the PointerFinder was working just fine.

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com






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