Re: Forthcoming revisions to the garbage collector; crazy huge hack

Nix> I'm currently in the middle of a hack of crazy size, jumping in at the Nix> deep end of XEmacs development, in order to familiarize myself with all Nix> the code. Martin> Richard Reingruber is working on a new GC. It can be found in the Martin> CVS branch NewGC-21-2. Richard is quiet. Search for his few postings Martin> on xemacs-beta. Richard is a student of Michael Sperber. Martin> Yoshiki Hayashi has written a copying gc for xemacs recently. It is Martin> not yet ready for prime time. His is precise, i.e. he has to maintain Martin> all the gcpros, and actually add a few, since the copying involves Martin> finding and updating ALL the places on the stack where Lisp_Objects Martin> live. Let me try to clarify matters: - Robert Pluim <rpluim(a)bigfoot.com&gt; at one time did hook up the Boehm collector to XEmacs in 1999 with rather disappointing results. - Richard has been working on making the current GC replaceable. This is a somewhat different goal from implementing a new GC (which is what Yoshiki Hayashi did). Hopefully, there'll be enough time left from his thesis project (which is finished) to actually plug in a different GC, albeit one he didn't write himself. (Current plans are for the RScheme incremental collector.) The interface is mostly finished; the only thing currently missing is a write barrier. - I rather doubt that Richard will have enough time to integrate the changes of the NewGC branch into the trunk. This would be a very worthwhile goal for anyone working on the GC, no matter which one. - You generally might want to look at http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/sperber/xemacs/next-gener... to read up on some of the issues involved. It's quite dated by now, but most of the stuff there still applies. -- Cheers =8-} Mike Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla