I like the idea, and it could work in many cases, but it's hard to make it truly... | Hacker News

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azakai on May 30, 2013 | parent | context | favorite | on: Running Lua in a browser via Emscripten

I like the idea, and it could work in many cases, but it's hard to make it truly universal. For example languages like Lua, Java and C# have finalizers, and JavaScript GCs do not, so you can't reuse the outer GC. Other possible issues are weak refs, etc.

So even if we duplicate by compiling another GC, we are enabling new types of GCing, it isn't an exact clone.

mzl on May 31, 2013 | [–]

While Java does have finalizers, there is no guarantee that they will run. In other words, a valid implementation could just skip running them at all.

stormbrew on May 30, 2013 | [–]

That's a good point, and a shame as well. Hopefully they both get added to the language at some point and we can move towards something like this.

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