that’s pretty cool Only 40% reduction in speed is pretty good for replacing a big mature library like libgc. I’m sure you can eventually make it faster, and getting rid of the libgc dependency is really good.

A couple of memory debuggering and profiling aids:
- valgrind http://valgrind.org/
- dmalloc http://dmalloc.com/

A memory pool of sorts should help speed things up. Figure out the sizes that get malloc’d often and create a pool for that stuff. Like a small cache of objects you can draw from.

Also reducing many small mallocs into one is another optimization. So instead of asking to create one object change your code to create many objects.

So if you do something like range(1000) it can do one malloc, and not 1000. http://rene.f0o.com/mywiki/BatchingApis

I’m sure profiling (probably with valgrind) will help you speed it up too.

cu,