Re: memory management and productivity

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

David Starner wrote:

> The only library garbage collectors I know about are conservative; they
> assume that every pointer-size chunk of accessible memory is a pointer,
> (unless it's in a block of data that was allocated with a special function
> that tells the GC there are no pointers in that data.) They don't move
> memory because you can't adjust pointers if you can't tell pointers from
> integers. A garbage collector that was part of the compiler could tell
> integers from pointers (that is, be a precise collector instead of a
> conservative collector) and could move items in memory (which many
> high-performance GCs do.) This makes easier, for example, for a compiler
> to scan only the new stuff, which has a shorter live time than the stuff
> the program has kept around for a while. The first may be more important;
> a misplaced integer could potentially hold several megabytes of garbage in
> memory.

I see. For a language like Ada, something that can't tell a pointer from 
an integer clearly isn't as good as it could be. I knew there had to be 
some drawback with a garbage collector that works for C. :-)

-- 
Björn Persson                              PGP key A88682FD
                    omb jor ers @sv ge.
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