Hello
I have asked these questions many times but never got an answer that I
found satisfactory.
1 - How difficult it is to instrument the GCC backend to support GC
languages (not necessarily Lisp or Dylan)?
2 - If it "not that difficult" are there plans to include support for
GC in the standard distribution of GCC?
Answer in private. I'll post a summary
Thanks
--
Marco G. Antoniotti - Resistente Umano
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...e` la semplicita` che e` difficile a farsi.
...it is simplicity that is difficult to make.
Bertholdt Brecht
·······@mosaic.robotics (Marco Antoniotti) writes:
>Hello
>I have asked these questions many times but never got an answer that I
>found satisfactory.
>1 - How difficult it is to instrument the GCC backend to support GC
> languages (not necessarily Lisp or Dylan)?
>2 - If it "not that difficult" are there plans to include support for
> GC in the standard distribution of GCC?
If you use a conservative garbage collector, it empirically works now.
(Sather, Modula-3 and GCL all take advantage of this, I believe.)
If you really want to guarantee safety of the result with optimization
enabled, you need to do a bit of work to ensure that the optimizer does
not disguise pointers. Empirically, this doesn't seem to happen in real
code, but we can contrive code that causes problems. I believe it is
possible now to generate even C source code that is completely safe with
a conservative garbage collector, provided you know it will be compiled
only with gcc.
You can get to some more details from
ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/gc/gc.html
Hans-J. Boehm
(·····@parc.xerox.com)
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