Re: Beginner's questions

[David Starner <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> This is nothing to do with fashion, it is to do with user requirements.
> All that is needed to make garbage collection appear in GNAT for example
> is some customer who really needs it and is willing to fund at least part
> of the development cost.

One thing that may make this easier is that EGCS snapshot now includes a
conservative garbage collector for the Java compiler, so it shouldn't be
that hard to connect GNAT to that garbage collector when it runs on
EGCS. Trying that is on my list for my first EGCS project (hopefull
sometime in the next few years.)

> Note that it is perfectly posssible to use any one of several conservative
> garbage collectors with GNAT. 
Like writing an interface for the Boehem GC for each class? Is there a
better conservative GC to use with Ada, or a more Ada-native interface?

> Indeed, we have delayed using virtual origins
> for arrays (one of the improvements on our list, which would noticeably
> improve efficiency, especially of Fortran type numeric codes), precisely
> because it would be incompatible with such collectors.
Thanks. I appreciate it.
 
> Why don't these meet your needs?
Because we're lazy, and it's much easier just to set a compiler switch.
Also, the documentation offers no clues that it is safe to use such
garbage collectors. It would be nice to have a statement in the compiler
docs that it should be fairly safe to use a conservative garbage
collector.