Pointer validation code

[Scott R. Presnell]

donl at glass.esd.sgi.com (donl mathis) writes:

>In article <9102041731.aa11984 at WOLF.BRL.MIL>, mike at BRL.MIL (Mike Muuss) writes:
>> I handle memory corruption and pointer mis-handling in a rather
>> different manner.  I have "wrapper" subroutines called

>I have a similar package that accomplish much the same thing, but in a
>somewhat more formal environment.  My model for memory use was that a

[...]

With all this talk of pointer validation, wrappers for alloc etc. I thought
I'd ask if anyone had been using the C garbage collection scheme posted to
comp.sources.unix about a year and a half ago?  Having learned Lisp before
C I thought garbage collection was a pretty cool idea...  I ran the test
and tried it out a couple of times on my own small programs without any
problems, but I haven't used it in a "production" tool yet.  Anyone using
it out there?

This is the header to the post:
=
=This is intended to be a general purpose, garbage collecting storage
=allocator.  The algorithms used are described in:
=Boehm, H., and M. Weiser,
="Garbage Collection in an Uncooperative Environment",
=Software Practice & Experience, September 1988, pp.  807-820.
=
=Many of the ideas underlying the collector have previously been explored
=by others.  (We discovered recently that Doug McIlroy wrote a more or less
=similar collector that is part of version 8 UNIX (tm).)  However none of
=this work appears to have been widely disseminated.
=
=The tools for detecting storage leaks described in the above paper are not
=included here.  There is some hope that they might be released by Xerox in
=the future.
=
=Since the collector does not require pointers to be tagged, it does not
=attempt to insure that all inaccessible storage is reclaimed.  However,
=in our experience, it is typically more successful at reclaiming unused
=memory than most C programs using explicit deallocation.
=
	Just curious

	- Scott Presnell (srp at cgl.ucsf.edu)

--
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