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Starting with the release 0.9.0, libFoundation supports the Boehm's
garbage collector as an alternative to the standard memory allocation
from OpenStep. We consider the new mechanism as a better alternative
to the standard way because of its benefits:
* the programmer is no longer required to use the
-retain/release/autorelease messages, so a source of bugs introduced
by the missuse of these methods is removed
* the reference counting memory management is unable to properly
handle graphs of objects that contain cycles. This is not the case
with the Boehm's conservative collector, it automatically eliminates
the cycles.
To work with the Boehm's collector several changes were made to the
Objective-C runtime. Here is a small description of the changes to the
GNU runtime to support the Boehm's collector:
* a new member was added to the objc_class, it keeps the type
description of each class. This type description is needed because
we use the typed memory allocation available in Boehm's collector to
maximize the performance and to be able to use the so-called
'invisible' pointers (see below).
[Be careful to use typed memory with variable sized instances !!!]
* defines two new runtime functions, class_get_gc_object_type and
class_ivar_set_gcinvisible. The first function provides access to
the type descriptor of a class. The second function marks a named
instance variable name as invisible to the collector, aka a pointer
which is not considered by the collector a reference to a particular
zone of memory.
* the allocation functions are set up to the the Boehm's collector.
Currently only the GNU runtime is supported and I don't think I'll be
able to add support for NeXT runtime anytime soon because this support
requires access to the runtime sources :-(.
The garbage collected library is chosen automatically by the makefile
package when you specify the gc=yes flag to the top-level make
process, in addition to the rest of the options:
$ make debug=yes gc=yes
This happens automatically only when you're working with libFoundation
in the GNUstep environment. If you're working in the standalone
environment, you should add -DLIB_FOUNDATION_BOEHM_GC=1 to the
compiler's command line and link against libFoundation_gc.a or
libFoundation_gc.so.
The library is installed in a different directory than the normal one,
the library combo is extended with one more part that specifies the
Boehm's GC. To take advantage of the Boehm's collector, you will need
to rebuild all your libraries so that they'll exist in this
directory. Other than that you normaly don't have to modify your
programs except for optimizing them for the presence of Boehm's
collector. libFoundation for example removes out all of the
retain/release/autorelease messages sent to objects so that the
overhead of sending these messages is completely eliminated.
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