Re: Garbage collection, part two...

From: Felix Lee <flee_at_teleport.com>
Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2000 18:14:08 -0700

Paul Anderson <paul_at_grammatech.com>:
> Thank you for that suggestion. I had not known about
> volatile! The definitions for what it means are a little
> vague to say the least. I don't know if we can rely on
> all the compilers we might use to guarantee that
> it is obeyed.

volatile is ANSI C. STk already requires ANSI C, so it
should be supported by all the usable compilers.

Now, whether volatile support is buggy or not... volatile
is necessary for setjmp/longjmp to work sanely in ANSI C, so
volatile is quite likely to work right on any compiler that
isn't completely broken.

> > rrrr. finding other occurrences of this type of problem is
> > nontrivial. it can happen whenever you construct a scheme
> > object as a temporary holder for non-scheme objects.
>
> But only if you have taken a copy from the objects
> internals whose recovery by the GC would cause problems.
>
> It is hard for me to imagine cases where this might occur.

Yea, which is why I said it's nontrivial to find :) I
couldn't think of any case where that might occur either.
Except there is such a case, the bug in question, and I
doubt I would have been able to think of it, so my
imagination is insufficient. Which leaves me with
exhaustive analysis as the remaining option.

Perhaps someone else has a better imagination.
--
Received on Fri Apr 07 2000 - 03:14:37 CEST

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