Daniel White wrote:
That would be a bad idea. Then how would you do manual memory
management in the few cases that absolutely require it?
Two ways. Either:
a: being able to lock the variable so that the garbage collector
can't touch it until you unlock it.
If you have a reference to the memory, the GC won't collect it. Unless
you make a habit of hiding pointers inside non-pointer types, that is,
which can result in undefined behavior if the hidden pointer points to
GC-allocated memory.
If you don't have any reference to that memory, then the garbage
collector can free it, but in that case, I don't see why it would be an
issue, most of the time. If you have a destructor, just be careful --
for instance, if you have an open file in that object and its destructor
closes that file.
b: Using a slightly different version of malloc (say 'mallocl') which again,
makes it shielded against the garbage collector's wrath.
malloc is C stdlib malloc. The garbage collector won't touch it.
