Digging out...
On May 9, 2005, at 4:08 PM, Steven Augart wrote:
I'd like to take off on a tangent here. At one point I had the naive
idea that I could make Jikes RVM able to play nicely with GCJ. What
really quashed the idea was the issue of garbage collection -- GCC is not
designed to pass type information down to the lower levels of the
compiler, so GCJ doesn't build a "gc map", which you need in order to be
use any GC other than a Boehm-style conservative non-copying collector.
In other words, GCJ is restricted to using a garbage collection that
looks for any bit patterns in the data that might be pointers, and it has
to assume that all of them are pointers. If I am mis-stating the
problem, I would appreciate someone publicly correcting me.
Further, I've heard (have not looked at it myself, nor am I competent to
do so) that it would be an enormous amount of work to retrofit GCC so
that GCJ could build GC maps.
Would there be a general facility that would be useful for other languages? Would that help amortize the work? Do you know others that are interested?
-- Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
