[gclist] 1 doubt about Boehm's Garbage Collector. (fwd)

[Neal M Gafter]

Kragen wrote:
> It'd be nice to have a convenient, prepackaged libc with Boehm's gc
> linked in, so that people trying to use it don't have to suffer
> inconvenience in excess of what they suffer from trying to write
> software at all.  Maybe we could even compile it with bounds-checking
> enabled?  Does anyone think this would be a worthwhile project?

Yes: we do.

We're planning to ship a separate library with the next major version of
Sun's tools that provides this function.  It's based on Geodesic
Systems' Great Circle technology, which is a descendent of Boehm's
collector.  You can link your program statically with the new library to
get GC transparently.  More interesting is the fact that you can preload
the dynamic library version to run an existing program with GC.  This is
a performance win for many applications --- Netscape, for example.

You can get on the "early access" (beta) program by contacting Vijay
Tatkar at <Vijay.Tatkar@Eng.Sun.Com> to make arrangements.  Early access
availability is expected to begin in about a month.