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

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Monday, May 13, 2002, at 07:26 PM, Ovidiu Predescu wrote:

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

Pretty much what I wrote a couple of years ago ... which was pre-alpha
and somewhat buggy (and didn't support distributed objects at all).
When I implemented basic GC support I got no response ...
absolutely nobody actually wanted to use it at the time (and while I 
like the
idea, I certainly don't need it myself), so I stopped work on it and 
have not
paid much attention to it since ... so it has almost certainly 
deteriorated
rather than improved since then.

> 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.

It's basically there in base, but not done at all for gui/back.

I don't think there is any point trying to implement it in the other 
libraries
until it's *very* reliable in the base library.

I'm happy/eager to spend time checking and applying patches and fixes to 
base,
but I don't want to spend development time on it myself given the 
previous lack
of response.

If someone else actually gets most of the base library to a reliably
working state, I'll volunteer to implement GC for distributed objects
(one of the trickiest areas), but probably not otherwise.

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

I agree that this would be nice.

PS. Nicola knows much more about the make package ... but it used to 
work.
Probably it still does, but you had to build all the libraries you were 
going to
use as gc libraries (for my purposes, that was only libobjc and 
gnustep-base),
and I think that Nicolas concerns are mostly to do with how the make 
system can
ensure it doesn't link non-gc code with gc code - an important issue 
if/when
we start to routinely use gc.