On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 5:30 AM, Richard Biener <richard.guent...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Note that I don't think that non-GC is inherently better than GC. In fact, > using a GC leads to easier maintainable code. I don't think there is a direct relationship, actually. Other, easier to maintain compilers, are quite happy without a GC. I do agree, however, that a bad memory management system leads to maintainability issues. We definitely do not want to fall into the obstack nightmare. We are fully prepared to go about this very carefully. The most important intermediate step to take now is to get gengtype out of the picture. Making use of a couple of C++ facilities, we can make GC marking simpler without requiring ad-hoc GTY markers. In our code base, GC makes for up to 10% of compilation time. We are looking to eliminate this overhead. Additionally, reducing memory consumption is a secondary benefit we are pursuing. > So - I don't want to discourage your work but I think the cycles > trying to "remove" > GC are better spent elsewhere. For example in solving real problems, > like debug info for LTO. Yeah, debug info for LTO also needs fixing. I agree that it would be great if someone worked on that. I'm actually not sure if it's listed in the improvements wiki, perhaps it should be. Diego.
