Re: ORBit and the Boehm garbage collector

[Dick Porter <dick acm org>]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2000 at 05:25:37PM +0100, Philip Lijnzaad wrote:
> Dear all, 
> 
> just a brief question: 
> 
> has anyone tried to compile ORBit (and servers, and clients) using a garbage
> collector such as the one by Hans Boehm (see
> http://reality.sgi.com/boehm_mti/gc.html) ?

Theres a simple answer: try it and see!

All ORBit internal memory allocation should be using the glib g_malloc,
g_malloc0, g_realloc and g_free functions (which in turn call malloc() etc
but also do additional housekeeping) or their g_new wrappers. I have done some
simple experiments with the Boehm GC lib and glib, by redefining the g_*
functions to call GC_malloc(), and it seems to work.

Other libraries may well use malloc(), so you may want to redefine that
too, or play other linker tricks. (I redefined g_malloc, because I didnt
want glib's own housekeeping to collide with Boehm's).

> 
> I imagine that this could be made to work easily, and would make programming
> with ORBit that much easier.
> 
> Also, it would make adding yet more language mappings easier, because the
> resource management that much easier

Let us know :-)

> 
> Cheers,
> 
>                                                                       Philip

- Dick