Re: I'm new and wanting to help!

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Joel Dice writes:
 > On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Tom Tromey wrote:
 > 
 > > Joel> Would it be possible to use debug information to determine the stack
 > > Joel> layout, similar to how DWARF is used for unwinding?
 > >
 > > Yes.  Actually there is a paper from 10 years ago or so where the
 > > authors did just this, in GCC, for Modula-3 as I recall.  As I
 > > remember the paper, it was a lot of work.  And, the patches were never
 > > integrated.
 > 
 > Well, it's nice to know it's possible, anyway. :)
 > 
 > > I'm not a GC expert, so I don't know how well this would really
 > > compare to what we've got now.  And, maybe a mostly-copying GC would
 > > serve just as well.
 > 
 > I'm no expert either, but my understanding is that you pick copying GC 
 > when you want to maximize cache locality and minimize fragmentation.  In 
 > order to get an idea of how such a strategy compares with conservative GC, 
 > it may be worth benchmarking something like PLT Scheme, which supports 
 > either, I believe.

Maybe.  But I suspect the real big problem is that this work would be
hard to get into gcc, for the same reasons that the Modula-3 changes
didn't go in: too intrusive.

Andrew.