[bitc-dev] Pools in lieu of GC

[Geoffrey Irving]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Rick R <rick.richardson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I would be very interested to know which situations *you* have in
>> mind, and *why* GC is inappropriate for those situation.
>
> Cell Phone Applications. Three reasons:
>
> 1: The iPhone docs (but not the official agreement) disallows GC. The
> default garbage collector for the Cocoa SDK is disabled in the iPhone SDK.
> Using alternate forms of GC is discouraged.
>
> 2: Dynamic Linking is disallowed in official iPhone apps. So using a GC as
> an .so (which is commonly done with the boehm GC) is disallowed. This is
> obviously easy to work around.
>
> 3: The Boehm conservative GC is, well, quite conservative. Memory is still a
> limited resource (and paging not an option) on handheld platforms.

None of these reasons apply, since bitc is using its own type-directed
garbage collector, not a separate conservative collector.  Therefore,
the garbage collection should be baked into the generated C source
during translation.

Geoffrey