Re: Garbage Collection and other things (belated)

[Daniel Solaz <dsolaz sistelcom com>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
>That is a fairly strong claim. Of course, M3 _or_ Eiffel _or_ C++ can
>be dealt with sanely. But can M3 _and_ Eiffel _and_ C++ be dealt
>with sanely? (At least more sanely then the current GTK+ scheme?)
Hard to say. Not knowing much about GTK's structure, I suggested turning
reference counting off at will and letting the real GC do its job with
some help from the implementor.
>Multilingualism is certainly an important goal for GTK. But
>I'm still quite skeptical that any sort of GC in GTK can solve
>all the problems when it has to interact with the GC's in other
>languages.
If GTK is to be a portable toolkit, I believe it should make as few
assumptions as possible, and let the upper (or lower) layers take care
of some things in a manner that is more appropriate. Garbage collection
would be one.
Two different independent GCs will probably not work well together.
However, we're moving into theoretical ground. I will accept things as
they are now and try to find out how to make them work decently, if
possible.
-Daniel