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Re: I'm new and wanting to help!
Joel Dice writes:
> On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, Tom Tromey wrote:
>
> > * The holy grail would be to allow a copying GC somehow.
> > We think this is very, very hard.
>
> This is a topic near to my heart, since I'm implementing a Lisp
> interpreter using a copying GC. The challenge is to accurately identify
> where the pointers are on the stack. In my case, I maintain a
> thread-local linked list of pointer addresses, but this must be done
> manually and is obviously error-prone. If GCC could do this (or the
> equivalent) automatically in a language-independent way, it would be a
> huge help for all front ends, VMs, and interpreters needing accurate GC.
>
> Would it be possible to use debug information to determine the stack
> layout, similar to how DWARF is used for unwinding?
Yes, I think so. But gcc might determine, for example, that one
object was at an offset from another and never save a pointer to the
second object at all. It would be very hard to stop gcc doing this.
Andrew.