Re: autozone (Apple's Cocoa garbage collector) code opensourced

[David Chisnall]

On 17 Nov 2008, at 06:02, Krishna wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 1:01 AM, Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf
> <lars.sonchocky-helldorf@hamburg.de> wrote:
> > Some of you might be interested in this. AutoZone is Apple's   
> > garbage collector for Cocoa:
>
> Is it a drop-in GC? I remember reading that it requires compiler
> support for emitting write barriers etc.

It does, however clang will be emitting these automatically for the  
Apple runtime.  Since clang has a very clean runtime abstraction  
layer, we can probably steal 90% of the code we need from Apple.

I don't really like the Apple approach, since it doesn't integrate  
with the retain / release mechanism and so needs every framework to be  
recompiled with GC support (and without for non-GC programs), which is  
okay for Apple but a huge pain for packagers on *NIX, but it might be  
worth supporting for people who want to port their code from OS X.

David