Re: broken GC

[Rob Browning]

Miroslav Silovic <address@hidden> writes:

> Despite this limitation, I frankly think that precise GC would make
> Guile not worth the bother for C apps (C++ smart pointers might help
> C++ code to play nice). I recall somebody saying that precise GC was
> the main source of pain for Emacs programmers (but then, not being
> an Emacs hacker, I wouldn't know).

I've heard that too.

I'm still not sure.  I can see how having to ref/unref things could be
a problem, but it seems like most of the cases I can think of off the
top of my head, it wouldn't have been hard for me to accomodate that.
In fact, back when I was working heavily with RScheme, we had exactly
that situation and for our cases, it wasn't that big a deal.  However,
I'm not saying there aren't other cases for which the precise GC might
make things much harder, just that I haven't immediately thought of
them.

Also, If the maintenance overhead wasn't too high, I'm actually fairly
intrigued by the idea of a tool that could parse C (basically a full C
frontend) and generate modified code for the precise GC.  Such a C
mangler might also allow us to do some even more clever things with
documentation etc.

Didn't I hear somewhere that they were working on libgcc?  If so, does
it support this kind of thing?

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
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