[gclist] Experience with conservative GC sought

[Carl Bruggeman]

To: gclist@iecc.com
Subject: Re: [gclist] Experience with conservative GC sought 
--------
Sorry, I sent this off without thinking much (if at all) about it...

> Suggestion:  It seems to me it should be trivial to plug Boehm's
> collector into the current version of emacs:  just have the collect
> handler nil out the pointers on the root stack before doing a
> collection (no need to remove any of the current GC support code). 

The current version obviously has pointers that are encoded for run
time tagging, while it is the new version based on Guile/SCM that they
are considering using the Boehm collector.  So, to carry out this
experiment, either the new version of emacs has to be used, or the
Boehm collector has to be modified to recognize the encoding scheme in
the current version and treat any word that matches the encoding for
emacs pointers as potential pointers (doesn't sound too bad).  Anyone
know off hand if either of these are feasible? (Hans?)

Carl


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Carl Bruggeman -- bruggema@cse.uta.edu -- Phone: (817) 272-3600 Fax: 272-3784
Computer Science and Engineering Department -- University of Texas at Arlington