Re: Array marking

[Tom Tromey <tromey at cygnus dot com>]

Bryce> Why do we need a custom marking procedure (_Jv_MarkArray) for
Bryce> arrays?  Wouldn't it be faster to just allow the gc to scan
Bryce> object arrays conservativly, thus avoiding the overhead of
Bryce> frequent calls into libgcj during marking?

You're probably right.

Maybe we're doing it to ensure the array's class gets marked.
Right now I think (heap-allocated) vtables aren't scanned at all,
so we have to mark the class explicitly.  We could fix this, though.

We really do need nicer GC interfaces... I have some stuff here on
that to look at, but I haven't been able to dig up the time.

ISTR you have a GC benchmark of some sort.
If you want to run it both ways (hacking out the array marker is
probably easy), that would be cool.
Or, send me the benchmark and I'll do it someday (looking into GC
stuff is on my second to-do list -- so it might actually happen, but
probably not in the next week or two.  Eg I want to look at the gcj/gc
stuff in the new Boehm GC unless somebody beats me to it).

Tom