Re: tools to make non-conservative GC feasible.

[hjstein@bfr.co.il (Harvey J. Stein)]

"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:

 > Jim Blandy writes:
 > > This is basically what Emacs does.  I found that we frequently forgot
 > > to do the equivalent of s_defGc when it was necessary.  In your
 > > example, it's easy to see that rtn->length is protected, since rtn is
 > > protected, but when the function is doing something more complicated
 > > (walking and editing a tree), it got harder.
 > > 
 > > Don't get me wrong --- it feels nice and simple to me, too.  But it is
 > > a fact that I made a lot of mistakes.  Stallman did too.
 > 
 > The reason we like "conservative collectors" is because we can be lazy 
 > while programming and not worry about what does and doesn't have to be 
 > visible to the collector.

I thought the reason we liked conservative collectors is that they
work even when interacting with arbitrary C code.

-- 
Harvey J. Stein
BFM Financial Research
hjstein@bfr.co.il