Could someone point me towards what is necessary to add STL containers
to the garbage collector?
One big problem with garbage collecting in C++ is the need to run
destructors. If the (I believe very reasonable) decision is made to
require that running destructors is not necessary for garbage
collected types, then my experience is doing gc is very easy, and for
garbage collection it's easy to just look at the internal members
which all behave "sensibly".
Stripping away all the C++isms, and assuming that we use the default
allocator which uses malloc, then a std::vector is just a struct
struct vector
{
T* begin;
T* finish;
T* end_of_storage;
};
Where we increment finish whenever we add something to the vector,
until finish = end_of_storage, at which point new memory is allocated,
the data is copied across, and then the old memory is freed. I can't
think of any other (or any simpler) way to construct a variable sized
container, in either C or C++.
Other containers are similar.