Re: garbace collection of point-markers

[Stefan Kamphausen]

Hi,

"Stefan Monnier <foo@acm.com>" <monnier+gnu.emacs.help/news/@flint.cs.yale.edu> 
wrote in message news:<5lptqd5j7m.fsf@rum.cs.yale.edu>...
> >>>>> "Barry" == Barry Margolin <barmar@genuity.net> writes:
> > Your test seems to show that the markers are *not* cleaned up by the GC.
> 
> They definitely should.  If they're not, it's a bug.

It would be very nice if they were GC'ed! 

In the info chapter "Overview of Markers" it states that
"Unreferenced markers are garbage collected eventually, but until then
will continue to use time if they do point somewhere." (both for GE
and XE)
and that using 
(set-marker MARKER nil)
is the correct way to mark them as unused. 

If that is correct, then:
How could I test that? (A function like list-buffer-markers (similar
to list-itimers in XEmacs) would be nice for this, but I'd appreciate
any help with this)


I've read the markers chapter in XEmacs Internals where it states that
"Markers are removed from a buffer in the finalize stage, in
`ADDITIONAL_FREE_marker()'". I don't know how this applies to GNU
Emacs (for which I couldn't find a similar documentation), but it
sounds like markers can't be deleted w/o killing the buffer which
would be in clear contradiction with the citation from above (so I'm
probably getting something wrong here)


Thanks for your already enlightening discussion 
and
Best Regards
Stefan Kamphausen