Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"dsimcha" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
== Quote from Denis Koroskin ([email protected])'s article
Aren't uint array allocations have hasPointers flag set off? I always
thought they aren't scanned for pointers (unlike, say, void[]).
Right, but they can still be the target of false pointers. In this case,
false
pointers keep each instance of foo[] alive, leading to severe memory
leaks.
I don't suppose there's a way to lookup the pointers the GC believes it has
found to a given piece of GC-ed memory? Sounds like that would be very
useful, if not essential, for debugging/optimizing memory usage.
Maybe extend the GC interface so the compiler and language in general
will give hints on what the memory is being used for. This could even
be extended to application code as well.
MEM_OBJECT, MEM_STRUCT, MEM_PTRARRY, MEM_ARRAY, etc. (I haven't fully
thought this through so these examples may be bad).
Then the GC implementations can decide how to allocate the memory in the
best way for the underlying architecture. I know this would be useful
on weird memory layouts found in embedded machines (NDS for example),
but could also be extended language-wise to other hardware memory areas.
For example, allocating memory on video cards or DSP hardware.
Like I said, this isn't something I have thought through much, and I
don't know how much (if any) compiler/GC interface support would be
required.
