[gclist] memory leaks and the Boehm collector

[Hans Boehm]

I just put a test version of our collector in

http://reality.sgi.com/boehm/gc_source/gc5.0alpha2.tar.gz

It has an initial implementation of Al Demers' pointer backtracing scheme.
 This is really an alpha-quality release; it has only been tested superficially
on a few platforms.  (5.0 alpha 1 and 2 both contain the new large block
allocator, and can unmap sections of the heap under favorable conditions.)

You need to build with -DKEEP_BACK_PTRS, and allocate with the debugging
allocators.  This will slow things down and increase space usage by the
proverbial "small constant factor".

The new interface is in backptr.h.  To get started, you can try calling

GC_generate_random_backtrace()

from the debugger, preferably not from within the collector.   (You will need
the debugger to interpret the results, since roots are currently printed a hex
addresses on all platforms.)

There should clearly be a better way to display results.

Hans

-- 
Hans-J. Boehm
boehm@sgi.com