Subject: garbage collection

From: "Paul D. Smith" <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 Dec 2000 11:22:50 -0500

All this talk about Insure++ licenses and Nils' malloc problem has got
me thinking.

After almost 16 years of programming in C, I just hate malloc/free for
the most part.  Yes, I understand, they provide low-level behaviors
which are important for some applications, but they are such a royal
pain in the rear that I think they should be reserved for _only_ those
cases where they're completely necessary.

I love, for example, alloca!  I use it wherever possible; it provides
for greater correctness by avoiding static buffer size issues, while
also avoiding the requirement that all that memory be freed.

So, here's the question (have I asked this already?  Sounds a bit like
deja vu to me): I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to try one of the
GC libraries for C.  They're not perfect (can't be, in C) but they can
be very effective if used as directed.  Also, for something like a
window manager which has large amounts of idle time (as a process) it
seems like GC wouldn't be a big problem.

My cynical side wonders if we'd just exchange memory stomps for GC
problems, but...

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 Paul D. Smith <[email-masked]>    HASMAT--HA Software Methods & Tools
 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
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---

From: Olivier Chapuis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 22:17:30 +0100

> seems like GC wouldn't be a big problem.

Do you have links to "GC" libraries?

Thanks, Olivier

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From: Michael Wolf <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 11:21:57 +1100

> Do you have links to "GC" libraries?

http://www.google.com/search?q=boehm+gc ought to be a good start.

mike

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From: Dan Espen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 09:22:30 -0500

> http://www.google.com/search?q=boehm+gc ought to be a good start.

Reading thru this, I think you hit it on the head Paul, we'd just
exchange memory stomps for GC problems.

With all the Purify and Insure++ testing we've done,
I think we have our malloc/free issues pretty much under control.

I think our problem right now is that we are down to that last 1% of
the bugs that take 20% of the time to find.

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Dan Espen
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