>> >> 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 [snip] >> 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?
After my work with MMTk and gcj I thought about doing this (or suckering some unsuspecting honours student into doing it :), but there is a second issue: CNI. CNI provides seamless integration between C++ and Java, and any object in the heap may simultaneously be a C++ object and a Java object. While there is a subset of C++ that is amenable to accurate GC, I think this issue may be a showstopper. Robin
