Please answer a question, asked by the hotshot computer Math professor here John Franks (a Rice pal of Clarence): does gsc/gcc implement a garbage collector? I figure it must, looking at this 112.6 GB, which you say is legit (and I've seen 435 GB too). But John points out that writing a garbage collector is serious work, and gcc doesn't have one.
Gambit's runtime system includes a garbage collector. This garbage collector is written in C and is precise (it is not a conservative GC). This is possible because the C code generated by the Gambit compiler manages its own runtime "stack" explicitly, and the GC knows how to parse the stack frames constructed by the compiler.
I'm not sure what you mean by "does gsc/gcc implement a garbage collector?" because the gcc ***compiler*** actually contains a garbage collector (but not the code that gcc generates). Moreover Gambit can be compiled with any C compiler, so the fact that Gambit contains a garbage collector has nothing to do with gcc.
Marc