Re: backend question

"Fergus Henderson" <fjh@students.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
1 Dec 2002 22:40:40 -0500

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[10 earlier articles]
Re: backend question fjh@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) (2002-11-24)
Re: backend question thp@cs.ucr.edu (2002-11-24)
Re: backend question whopkins@alpha2.csd.uwm.edu (Mark) (2002-11-24)
Re: backend question nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) (2002-11-24)
Re: backend question joachim_d@gmx.de (Joachim Durchholz) (2002-11-24)
Re: backend question nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) (2002-11-26)
Re: backend question fjh@students.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) (2002-12-01)
Re: backend question fjh@students.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) (2002-12-01)
Re: backend question nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) (2002-12-03)
Re: backend question thp@cs.ucr.edu (2002-12-07)
Backend Question mansuk@gmail.com (Suman Karumuri) (2005-10-07)
Re: Backend Question gneuner2@comcast.net (George Neuner) (2005-10-08)
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From: "Fergus Henderson" <fjh@students.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 1 Dec 2002 22:40:40 -0500
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne
References: 02-11-063 02-11-099 02-11-112 02-11-132 02-11-148
Keywords: C, design
Posted-Date: 01 Dec 2002 22:40:40 EST

"Nick Maclaren" <nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk> writes:


  >Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
  >>"David Chase" <chase@world.std.com> writes:
  >>
  >>>Standard C doesn't give you enough control to write a precise garbage
  >>>collector (one that can see all the pointers, and exactly all the
  >>>pointers),
  >>
  >>It does (albeit with a potentially significant performance cost).
  >>See my recent paper at ISMM'02 [1].
  >
  >Well, I have looked at it but can't say that I have studied it. I
  >think that you have assumed quite a few extra constraints - mainly of
  >the form that the C program is half sane!


Certainly. But we were talking about using C as a target language.
For that case, the high-level language compiler has complete control
over what C code is generated.


Note that even assembler doesn't give you enough control to write a
precise garbage collector that will work for arbitrary assembler programs!
So C is no worse than assembler in that respect.
--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au> | "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne | of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.

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