This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 50 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 50 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Per Bothner wrote: >Tom Lord wrote: > >> (b) it turns out that conservative GC is a sham in the sense that if >> you use it without a deep understanding of permissable C optimizations >> and eternal vigilance about what they might effect -- you're going to >> lose by writing subtly incorrect code. > >Nah. Theoretically possible, but I've never heard of it actually >effecting real code. Other compiler/OS bugs - or cosmic rays effecting >your memory are much more likely to bite you. I've been bitten by this while using a genetic algorithm. I had "random-looking" bit patterns (the genomes) filling almost 2Gbytes of memory space, and the Boehm collector was mistaking almost half of the words for possible pointers. It eventually reached a tipping point where the values it couldn't free contained enough "pseudopointers" to prevent it from freeing anything else, and crashed. I switched to explicit memory management and the problem went away. Bear