[Texmacs-dev] Re: Contributing to TeXmacs: garbage collector

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Dear Mr. Vansummeren,

On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 02:05:49PM +0100, Stijn Vansummeren wrote:
> My name is Stijn vansummeren; I am a post-doc researcher at Hasselt 
> University, Belgium. Niels sulejmani (in CC), a bachelor student of mine, is 
> doing his bachelor thesis about garbage collection. Browsing the TeXmacs 
> website, we noticed the need for a garbage collector in TeXmacs.  As such, 
> Niels would like to contribute a garbage collector to TeXmacs, provided this 
> is still usefull of course. If so,  we would appreciate any information you 
> might have to get him started. We would also appreciate it if you could let 
> us know if such a garbage collector is not necessary any more.

Thanks for considering this project.

Yes, a garbage collector, or at least a leak detector, would still be useful.
Currently, most objects are tree-like structures with reference counting.
As long as objects are really trees, reference counting is probably
the best strategy. However, occasionally, we also use additional pointers
which may induce circularity. Although this is rare, I have the impression
that a few memory leaks of this type are currently present. It would be good
to have a reliable strategy for detecting such leaks, or to implement
a garbage collector for them (which might be overkill though).

Best wishes, Joris

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P.S.: I CC-ed this message to our developers mailing list