Subject: Re: Garbage collection cost (was Re: Parenthesized syntax challenge)
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1995/10/29
Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan,comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.java
Message-ID: <19951029T012233Z@naggum.no>

[Henry Baker]

|   I would advise using .-relative addressing for all pointers (perhaps
|   some C compiler vendor/GNU is listening), and start using VM
|   compression.

[Hans Boehm]

|   Please don't do that for C; you'll break conservative GC completely.
|   (You'll also break at least all C code that calls third party
|   libraries, and I doubt you'll have an ANSI conforming compiler.  How do
|   you handle union assignments?  But I have my priorities straight :-))

this is odd.  to build shared objects (libraries) under, e.g., SunOS 4,
so-called "position-independent code" must be emitted by the assembler, and
special considerations must be followed by the compiler.  (not all C code
can be compiled into shared objects, but I don't know what the conditions
are.)  given this, are you saying that shared objects would cause the
compiler (or library) not to be conforming to ANSI C?  if so, this is,
IMNSHO, a problem in the standard (ISO C, actually) that should be fixed.

#<Erik 3023918552>
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