Static Memory Area for Garbage Collection

[R Karthick]

Hi,

I am in the process of designing a conservative garbage collector for C
++.

As one of the requirement of conservative garbage collection, I will
have to scan through the static memory area and look for probable
pointers into the heap.

I am stuck in the implementation part, where I am not very sure on
which physical address the static elements are stored for X86
machines. Is the address of the static area stored in some processor
register? If yes how can I access it in a C++ program?

Thanks!

 

[Victor Bazarov]

I am in the process of designing a conservative garbage collector for
C ++.

As one of the requirement of conservative garbage collection, I will
have to scan through the static memory area and look for probable
pointers into the heap.

I am stuck in the implementation part, where I am not very sure on
which physical address the static elements are stored for X86
machines. Is the address of the static area stored in some processor
register? If yes how can I access it in a C++ program?

The boilerplate answer is "you cannot". C++ has no concept of "X86".
It has no concept of accessible (for scanning) "static memory area".
All of those things are compiler- and platform-specific and should be
asked about in the newsgroup specialising in your particular platform
and compiler.

There are several commercial implementations of garbage-collecting
memory managers on the market. Perhaps you should give those a look.

V

 

[Matthias Buelow]

There are several commercial implementations of garbage-collecting
memory managers on the market. Perhaps you should give those a look.

Just for completeness, there's also the free Boehm GC, which claims
(some) support for C++. I've never tried it myself, though.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/

 

[James Kanze]

Just for completeness, there's also the free Boehm GC, which claims
(some) support for C++. I've never tried it myself, though.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/

Actually, it has very good support for C++. I've used it, at
least with g++ under Linux, and it works quite well.