> On 21 May 2020, at 15:37, Larry Campbell <lcamp...@akamai.com> wrote:
>
> Currently gnustep-base raises an exception if the retain count exceeds 24
> bits. There's a comment there:
>
> /* I've seen comments saying that some platforms only support up to
>
> * 24 bits in atomic locking, so raise an exception if we try to
>
> * go beyond 0xfffffe.
>
> */
>
> Is this really true? On what platforms? 24 bits is really not a very big
> number. (It is causing me pain right now.)
It's probably not true of modern systems (certainly seems unlikely for 64bit
systems).
However, the code in NSObject.m was written to support a lot of old systems ...
On the other hand, while 24bits is not huge (16 million) I think it's big
enough so that hitting that limit is more likely to be a timely warning about a
memory management error (the same object being retained repeatedly and never
released) than a limitation, so making it a configurable limit rather than
removing it altogether probably make sense (it is of course trivial to hack
NSObject.m to remove it).
