dynamic library cost (was RE: libtool, java woes)

[Jonathan P. Olson]

Does anybody have a feel for the costs of non-conservative stack 
scanning?

Seems like the compiler would have to emit a ton of debugging information
to specify the contents of each word of the stack frame at each PC 
location
within the program.  Wading through all this mess in a GC would likely be
more costly than just conservatively scanning the stacks.

In my experience, stacks are normally the smallest amount of memory 
that's
actually scanned by a collector.  Most O-O applications have an order of 
magnitude
more heap memory allocated than stack memory, so the only thing a precise
stack scan would buy you is elimination of (theoretical) memory leaks.

On Friday, April 13, 2001, at 04:52  AM, dewar@gnat.com wrote:

>> Adding non-conservative stack scanning is much harder
>
>
> A nice term for non-conservative GC that has been introduced by IBM is
> "type accurate".