[Inkscape-devel] Re: C-based garbage collection for Inkscape

Thanks Keith, passing along to the crew...

Bryce

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Keith Packard wrote:

I've been using a garbage collector in C for about twenty years which is different from the Boehm system.

advantages:

1. Completely portable -- no machine dependent code at all
2. Integrates with malloc/free using code
3. Precise pointer knowledge - the set of referenced objects is known,

not discovered.

disadvantages:

1. Requires stylized function call/return macros both where the

allocator is used as well as in at least one place above all allocation calls in the call graph.

It's part of the nickle language implementation (http://nickle.org) and has been used in several other projects to good effect.

-keith