gcj mingw32 and java memory footprint.

[Jeff Sturm]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, Norbert Frese wrote:
> just a theoretical reflection: would it be possible to combine a tracing
> collector with reference counting?

Sure that's possible.  I don't know if it would be a win for gcj.

> but i guess there is no way to use such model with gcj, because it would
> require a lot of macros for reference copying... and i'm sure there are a
> lot of other problems involved with reference counting which i don't really
> know about... (threads, performance...)

Gcj itself could be modified to generate code for reference counting, so
it's not exactly impossible.  However:

The size of every object would increase to store the ref count.  That
might defeat the space savings you're after.

The atomic increment/decrement you'd need could impact performance
severely, I'd guess.  Also the size of generated code would increase.

I think it would be an interesting experiment, difficulties
notwithstanding.

Jeff