Re:Lisp without GC! (Score 1)

It is not that the garbage collection is too slow in Lisp, he gave the reason that the amount of data that it had to go through was very large. The point of the system was to be as speedy as possible and garbage collection would slow that down no matter how much or how little data you gave it to process.

The speed of your GC does not have to be dependant on the amount of data allocated through Lisp's storage management facility. For example, many garbage collectors (such as those found in the Lisp implementations used by ITA) allow one to allocate objects in "static space" which is effectively not examined by the scavenger.

The more compelling reason to allocate objects in foreign space is mentioned at the end of paragraph 5. You can mmap() huge amounts of data read-only and have it sharable amongst an arbitrary number of user level processes.