GC and static data (Was: Projects)

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Hans" == Boehm, Hans <hans_boehm@hp.com> writes:

Hans> What is actually preventing somone from turning on incremental
Hans> GC in the current collector?  It seems to me there are three
Hans> likely issues:

Hans> 3) Native code doesn't tolerate the SIGSEGV's used to implement
Hans> the write barrier.

In our case we trap SIGSEGV and turn it into a NullPointerException.
So it seems we would have runtime clash: both libgcj and the GC want
to trap this signal.

Hans> If you use a non-VM write barrier, native code becomes even more
Hans> of an issue, it seems to me.

Our basic plan has been to change both gcj *and* g++ to implement the
write barrier (at least for Java objects).  This seems like a
reasonable approach.  Perhaps there are difficulties I don't know of.
No one has looked at the problem in a very serious way yet.

Tom