This article reminds me of an idea I once had: to write a memory manager/garbage collector for C. The challenge is to know the scope of a dynamically managed chunk of memory. Using that, the memory can be automatically garbage-collected, but this is difficult since C wasn't designed for this in mind.
I'm curious if anyone has any other experiences they can share.
How did you determine the scope of a chunk of memory? I believe you need this to run any of the GC algorithms.
I checked the hboehm documentation (1) and in the section on "Locating roots" it says "you don't want to know":
-Runtime stack(s): you don't really want to know.Need consistent caller-save reg. snapshot
-Static data segments: you don't want to know that either.
-Very platform dependent But you only have to do it once per platform.
roots in boehm means globals and the stack. this little thing had explicitly declared roots.
edit: I found it, mail me at yuri@tenuki.org. be prepared to be unimpressed.