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Re: Comparing Pika-syle and JNI-style

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.



    > From: Shiro Kawai <shiro@xxxxxxxx>

    > >     > As Per noted, Boehm GC avoids this if configured with "interior
    > >     > pointer" flag.

    > > Ok, but that doesn't help if the data is separately allocated.

    > If you're accessing the data chunk and no reference except
    > from the scheme_value local variable points to the string header,
    > then the string header can be collected, but that doesn't matter
    > (since you don't need it anyway).

In the system where I saw these kinds of bugs, freeing the header
triggered freeing the string data.  If the Boehm collector supports
finalizers of some sort then it would admit similar bugs.

    > > Or, for that matter, if my pointer is pointed past the end of the
    > > string but I'm indexing at a negative offset from it.

    > You can point the next address past the end of chunk and still the
    > chunk is retained, since in C it is a valid pointer usage.
    > (you can change this behavior by configuration option, though).

That's good.   Yes, I believe that Boehm's collector can address many
of the bugs -- just not enough to excuse it for critical systems.

    > > The whole thing just plays way too fast and loose with C semantics to
    > > be acceptable for critical systems.

    > Yup.   I don't object to this feeling.   I just wanted to be precise
    > about the facts.

And it's much appreciated.   I've learned from you.

-t