[gclist] Two conservative collectors

[Fergus Henderson]

On 18-Nov-1999, Charles Fiterman <cef@geodesic.com> wrote:
> As to traceback info, to be useful this involves understanding data
> definitions. I'm sure you can give it in hex but what earthly good is that
> to humans. Traceback has to say things like
> 
>   filex.cpp:17 frobNick *foo == 0x127080 (vtbl frobNick)
>   0x127088 (char *)name == 0x141200 (no vtbl)
> 
> You would be saying
> 
>   0x560800 == 0x127080
>   0x127088 == 0x141200

Certainly the hex dump is not ideal, but it's a vast improvement on
nothing at all.  Given the hex dump, I can go into gdb and type

	gdb) p/a 0x560800

and gdb will decode the hex addresses into symbolic addresses for me.
Sure, it would be nicer if that was automated, so that the collector's
traceback did the conversion from hex to symbolic automatically,
but it's not _essential_.  If I have a need for it, I can spend the fifteen
minutes or so that it would probably take to write a small script to automate
that, so that I can pipe the output from the collector traceback into
that script.  But so far I've only need to use the Boehm collector's
traceback facility once, and doing it manually was sufficient.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.