various gc proposals

[Mark S. Miller <mark>]

Date: Mon, 20 Nov 89 14:02:25 PST
   From: tribble (Eric Dean Tribble)

   1)  Can Nat fix some of the unimplemented features?  such that those
   changes can then be publicized?  we could even pay some for this.  I
   realize that it looks vaguely ridiculous, but it might be the easiest
   thing to do.

I'm going to be persuing this.  I think it's our best option.

   2)  Can we restrict the times when a garbage collection is allowed?
   ...
   3)  Can we generalize on 2)?  We could define some way for users to
   specify when garbage collection is allowed (or disallowed).  ...

   I hope that 2 and 3 let us move smoothly to compilers that support
   more features of the language.

I would be very scared to go down this route.  It seems *extremely*
complex to me.  I haven't thought too hard about it, but it seems to
remove much of the motivation for having a garbage collector.  It
would probably also be very dangerous and hard to check.

I think we're stuck either fixing the language in a way that can get
highly ported (like getting it into the 2.1 release), or doing without
&& and || in our code.