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In the absence of really exciting new hacks I haven't heard of, Guile will continue to use conservative GC. The alternatives --- explicitly marking heap pointers, and reference counting --- are clearly unacceptable, given Guile's goals. I have direct long-term experience trying to use the first, and the second doesn't support Scheme's semantics. I think nobody's done a library for finding the stack base, because nobody but a conservative GC would care. Conservative GC's are relatively new. I definitely sympathize with Guido's reaction --- Why would I put something that unportable in my interpreter? --- but I think it's better than reference counting. It's okay to introduce horrible, system-specific hacks like this, if they have a clean interface --- that is, if they don't percolate their inner details out to the rest of the system. On the face of it, I think finding the stack bottom falls in this category.