Re: Making GC aware of overall allocation?

[Lars Arvestad <arve at nada dot kth dot se>]

Miroslav Silovic writes:
MS> Use scm_must_malloc instead of malloc in your C code. Make sure that
MS> the free function for your smobs returns the accurate value for the
MS> memory freed (i.e. matching the ammount allocated with
MS> scm_must_malloc), otherwise your gc will get very confused.

But this seems to be the wrong approach IMHO. If I get my hands on a
library that I want to access from Guile, I should not have to rewrite 
important parts of it. 

In my case, I want to eventually distribute a C library to be linked
in any application and do not want any dependencies on Guile. I could provide my own version of
scm_must_malloc which would essentially be an alias for malloc(), but
this will in the end evolve bugs with other programmers not honoring
the Guile legacy for instance. 

Remember that The Competition uses ref. counting and does not suffer
from this problem. There are other issues with that approach of
course, which is shy away from, but it is not like there is  not
complexity enough already for the new and naive Guile programmer to
instead consider the more simplistic competition.

	Lars

-- 
Lars Arvestad               Dept. of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science
                       Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden