[gclist] More questions for the FAQ

[David Chase]

Well, the FAQ's had another evening's work applied to it.
The major differences are:

* incorporation of changes recommended by Paul Haahr
  
* big distributed GC section from Marc Shapiro

* "write barriers" from Nick Barnes
  
* split up into three files

     http://www.centerline.com/people/chase/GC/GC-faq.html
     http://www.centerline.com/people/chase/GC/GC-algorithms.html
     http://www.centerline.com/people/chase/GC/GC-harder.html

  I did this to cut the sizes of the individual files.  I had
  a goal of 10K, but ended up at about 20k per file.
     
* Text versions available from the same directory, generated
  by lynx, with the names,

     GC-faq.txt
     GC-algorithms.txt
     GC-harder.txt
     
  Unfortunately, I don't think that this directory is accessible
  with ftp.  Therefore, I also placed a copy of these files in
  ftp.centerline.com:pub/outgoing/chase/.  Login anonoymous,
  username@hostname for a password.

I have yet to digest all this discussion about finalization.
The contributors list has fallen behind, too.  If people do
have HTML'd contributions to send in, just send in the new
text, not the diffs -- I often work at home on a Mac that
lacks "patch", so I end up doing it by hand.

However, I do have some more proposed questions for the FAQ, but 
lack complete answers.  Most of these are for the evangelism
section.

Q: What languages include/require/provide-by-default garbage collection?
A: Lisp, Smalltalk, ML, most of the scripting languages, Java, 
   Eiffel, Modula-3, Sather, Python, ... and how far should this 
   list go?  There's lots of GC'd languages that nobody has ever
   heard of.  I have some personal favorites, but that doesn't necessarily 
   count as a good reason to put them in the FAQ.

Q: What are some successful products or projects which make use of 
   garbage collection?
A: Macsyma?  Big Xerox copiers?

David Chase