Re: gc in GNUstep (Was: soname of gc variant of gnustep-base)

[Ovidiu Predescu]

Nicola,

What is the status for garbage collection support in gstep-base today?

The GNU Objective-C runtime, libFoundation and gstep-db have support
for Boehm's conservative garbage collector for a long time now. It
should be possible to follow the same approach to add support in the
base and GUI libraries as well.

I think it would definitely help a lot if automatic garbage collection
works out of the box with all the GNUstep libraries.

Regards,
-- 
Ovidiu Predescu <address@hidden>
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/7464/ (GNU, Emacs, other stuff)

On Mon, 13 May 2002 12:58:19 +0100 (BST), Nicola Pero <address@hidden> wrote:

> 
> > > I think gnustep-make doesn't really have a satisfactory / consistent
> > > support for garbage collection libraries ... I'd certainly like to fix
> > > this.
> > 
> > Maybe it's a little bit off-topic or already discussed to death, 
> > but what is the intended use/advantage of Garbage Collection in 
> > GNUstep?
> 
> Well ... that it is a great feature :-)
> 
> I am very happy with manual management of objects and memory, but it's a
> fact that some people prefer automatic garbage collection.  I suppose it's
> a matter of taste.
> 
> Having support for garbage collecting in GNUstep looks like a great thing
> ... in general terms, it's a great feature.  It doesn't really mean you
> must use garbage collecting in your programs ... but that you can use it.
> 
> I would be particularly interested in seeing if complete and working
> garbage collecting support would make it easier for people to start
> using/coding gnustep.  One of the most difficult and confusing things at
> the beginning is memory management (reference counting, autorelease pools
> etc).  Not that it is terribly difficult, but looks like most of the
> questions and errors and problems that people starting using gnustep have
> are related to memory management.  Maybe if we had garbage collecting we
> could tell people to start coding using the garbage collector, and learn
> about autorelese pools etc later on.