[Ecls-list] boehem gc vs built in gc

[lisp]

> On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 06:26:56PM +0200, Juan Jose Garcia Ripoll wrote:
>> On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 12:18 +0000, Bruce O'Neel wrote:
>> > Now, I'm not too stunned by the sparc64 box wanting more memory.  What
>> I am a
>> > bit suprised is the differences on the 32 bit systems.  I'd like
>> therefore to
>> > build ECL so that it uses it's internal gc rather than the bohem one
>
>> It is currently impossible, unless we fix a memory leak in the old
>> garbage collector (Well, not really in the collector itself, but in the
>> fact that it does not contemplate all possible roots). Help here would
>> be really appreciated, but I am afraid I will have to do it myself
>> eventually.
>>
Bruce O'Neel wrote:
> I'll add it to my long list of things to do, but, no guarantees...

Hopefully, I have managed to fix the last bugs in the garbage collector
today (CVS, as usual). At least ECL compiles itself and runs the simple
test suite, and is also capable of garbage collecting FASL files. Please
tell me if you find problems. I will do myself further testing on the
coming days.

Also, it is important to mention that our use of the Boehm-Weiser garbage
collector can be improved by clearing its lists of roots and using ECL to
build the list itself. That would remove a known problem: the GC scans the
static data region of the program looking for values that look like
pointers and marks the memory areas pointed by these values as unusuable.
This is enough to make the memory use vary between operating systems and
even different boxes (SMP vs. one-processor).

Juanjo