[gclist] gclist-digest V1 #40

[Darius Blasband]

> At this stage, there is absolutely no chance of including garbage
> collection in C++ during this round of standardization.  However,
> if anyone reading this list is keen on submitting a proposal,
> the time is ripe for making proposals to the C standardization
> committee, since work has begun on a new version of the C standard.

Is it really worth that kind of trouble ? Is GC really suited to
any language and environment ? I really don't think so. What about 
GC in Fortran ? Cobol ? RPG ? I think that C is better off with its
original manual allocation scheme. I am afraid that things have been 
going much too far for a reasonable formalization of GC in C. It would
interefere with so many other features of C that it would make the 
language definition awkward at best.

Somehow, a conservatice GC such Boehm's have only a very tiny relationship
with the supporting language. It is not closely related to C at all. I
guess it could be usable almost as is with Fortran... One might say
that it is more system-oriented GC than a language-oriented GC.

D.

P.S.: Oh, by the way, we tried Boehm's collector with YAFL. It
      worked rather fine, even if we don't plan to actually
      replace our precise GC. Benchmark and conclusions soon...