Re: [Liberty-eiffel] GC

[Raphael Mack]

So let us continue with details about the GC generation:

Cyril do you have a glue what the parameter string_at_run_time in  
MEMORY_HANDLER.manifest_string_in is good for? I see only ONE call of  
this feature, whith the constant True.

Similar for MEMORY_HANDLER.native9_in:
* I dislike the name
* I don't see any call of it
* the implementation of this deferred feature in SEGC and BDW is quite  
different (call of se_malloc in the opposite branch)

Can you enlighten me here?

And could you describe the special handlings for NATIVE_ARRAYs with  
respect to garbage collection? - I don't understand the idea behind  
LIVE_TYPE_NATIVE_ARRAY_COLLECTOR.

Cheers,
Rapha



Zitat von Cyril ADRIAN <address@hidden>:
> Hello Raphael,
>
> 2014-10-09 19:29 GMT+02:00 Raphael Mack <address@hidden>:
>
> > last days I digged into the code to understand what eiffeldoc currently
> > fails and in my eyes it turns out to be GC related.
>
> Great! I know there are problems with the GC but I never could pinpoint
> them. New eyes are a boon.
>
> I guess it is the same problem, why eiffeltest recently failed. Locally I
> > tried also with the SmartEiffel GC (which I somehow don't want see dying)
>
> (neither do I)
>
> and it seems to be the very same problem also. Some object only referenced
> > by a weak reference is collected and accessed afterwards. The interesting
> > thing is that it happens with both collectors. On 32 bit systems it somehow
> > looks different but still doesn't work (maybe we see a another bug there).
> > So my question is whether you remember some "recent" change in the weak
> > reference handling (maybe related to threading) or a date, when these
> > "random" faults started - We already saw these topics before you started to
> > integrate BDW. What is your feeling? Was this the same problem back then?
>
> I think so. The problem is quite old; maybe even before LibertyEiffel (I
> don't remember).
>
> How important/heavily used are weak references? - Could we easily
> > (temporary) remove their use from the core tools?
>
> The weak references are used to allow to free memory when the GC is in
> used. It is used quite a lot in the core libs to ensure that they work as
> well with and without GC, without wasting memory (no GC), and without
> memory retention (with GC).
>
> I am not sure how easy it would be to remove them.
>
> How stable have the weak references been in the HEAD of SmartEiffel repo?
> >
>
> Actually I don't remember. I guess we should checkout the repo and check.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Cyril