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Re: garbage collectors


> From: Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>
> 
> In theory, yes, conservative GC can cause an unbounded amount of
> garbage to be retained.  In practice, we haven't seen this as a
> problem.  We've found storage leaks in Guile, but they have never been
> the GC's fault --- just the humans, as usual.
> 

Perhaps, for the paranoid (or bitten), there could be a call that
designates a certain area of the stack as _not_ containing any
pointers into the heap.  This would be the inverse of the GC_PROTECT
macros of Emacs.  It would be dangerous, since Scheme would garbage
collect good data if you called GC_UNPROTECT incorrectly, but if
used correctly it would eliminate the possibility that some character
string you read into a global variable might have the same bit
pattern as a pointer to unbounded garbage.

-- 
     --Keith

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