I agree. GNUstep should *not* rely on it. No official GNUstep apps nor the GNUstep libraries should be designed such that garbage collection is expected. This will allow us the widest possible range of platforms.
Now the question is whether we should complete the implementation we already have or not. I think it's worth a shot to get boehm-gc working.
GC
Gregory Casamento -- Principal Consultant - OLC, Inc
# GNUstep Chief Maintainer
From: Richard Frith-Macdonald
<richard@tiptree.demon.co.uk>
To: Gregory John Casamento <greg_casamento@yahoo.com>
Cc: Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf <lars.sonchocky-helldorf@hamburg.de>; GNUstep Discuss <discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 3:46:05 PM
Subject: Re: autozone (Apple's Cocoa garbage collector) code opensourced
On 16 Nov 2008, at 20:25, Gregory John Casamento wrote:
> One problem here is that it's not compatible with the GPLv2. GNUstep is LGPLv2 or later. I'm wondering if this presents a problem for us. :/ I'm not sure if it does.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> If not it would be nice to see if we could get this working with GNUstep, but it's not something that we don't already have. There's a garbage collector which is written in C called boehm-gc and GNUstep already has the changes incorporated to use it.
The problem with the existing GC is ... it was never fully integrated, nobody (afaik) has ever really used it, so it has certainly bit-rotted to the point where it no longer works, and it's not compatible with the Apple garbage collection.
This means we really need someone to volunteer to update/fix the existing code and make it reasonably Apple compatible, or an apple compatible
implementation. Please!!
As long as using GC is only an option and we don't depend on it, we are probably OK to use Apple's code to offer a GC implementation.. not sure though.