[gambit-list] Re: Gambit is great: the manual should advertise better

Marc Feeley feeley at IRO.UMontreal.CA
Tue Feb 8 17:07:24 EST 2005


> 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



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