A Garbage Collector for C and C++

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

[GPS]: I've been impressed by how well it works.  I think that it might be interesting to build a Tcl-prototype that use the Boehm-GC for Tcl_Obj management.  It could possibly eliminate thousands of lines of code and improve the quality of Tcl/Tk.

There was an excellent article in [C/C++ Users Journal] about the Boehm-GC.

----

[Jacob Levy] July 18, 2003: Having used a commercial version of this garbage collector, I would strongly recommend against using it for Tcl. The free version is likely to be worse than the commercial version with which I have experience. Here are some points against using it: First of all, it does not work on all the platforms on which Tcl needs to run. Its allocator is about ten times slower than straight malloc. Tcl is also used in soft-real-time situations where predictability of performance is crucial, so we cannot tolerate arbitrary unpredictable pauses. Finally, it's a cop-out: we should get the refcounting mechanism (and in general, all memory management) to "just work", instead of abdicating this responsibility.