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How does memory management work in Crystal. Is it RC or GC or manual?

As a D user, I've been curious about Crystal for a while, but until it gets proper Windows support I won't be playing with it too much.

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Out of the box, Crystal does garbage collection through the boehmgc library, however if you pass in some compiler flags you can get application to not use GC.

As for my OS, I wasn't gonna port libgc, and since I have prior knowledge of building a GC in rust (very badly!) I decided to make a tri-color concurrent, mostly precise (through compiler patches), garbage collector, in Crystal.

Have you read Mike Pall's proposal for a quad-color collector in LuaJIT?[0] That you took this approach leads me to think you'd find it interesting.

[0]: http://wiki.luajit.org/New-Garbage-Collector

I've read up on how luajit does garbage collection (in fact the current gc/allocator with allocation/marking bitmaps is inspired by his tri-color gc. Apart from specifying when the GC should run, I won't be changing anything about the core gc algorithm used in the project anytime soon.

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