[Ecls-list] Safety of vector addresses.

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 4:03 AM, David Brown <lisp at davidb.org> wrote:
> I was wondering about the stability of item->vector.self pointers in
> ECL.  As I understand, the conservative GC never moves blocks of
> memory around, but I wanted to make sure this is correct.

In short, yes. Conservative means it does not move data and does its
best at assuming whether a memory word is a pointer or not.

> Basically, I'm looking to implement the shareable-byte-vector
> interface in CFFI, and wanted to make sure what I was doing was safe.

Please, do not worry. If we ever switch to a compactifying garbage
collector it should be either a conservative one (i.e. not moving data
which is pointed to by C) or be left as an optional component.

Juanjo

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