[erlang-questions] refactoring a very large record

[Matthew Sackman]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 08:35:38PM +0400, Michael Uvarov wrote:
> How does VM know when terms in the tuple are ready to be garbage
> collected? Is there counter of live painters?

I don't know how Erlang does it, but one approach is that from all your
processes stacks, traverse all pointers and mark all found terms as
"visited" (transitively). Then, work through everything in the heap and
anything not marked "visited" can be reclaimed.

With erlang's heap-per-process memory model and plus generational GC, I
could imagine this would work fairly well, but I've no idea whether this
is actually what's used.

Matthew