new principle of division between structures and classes

[Brad Roberts]

On Tue, 13 Jan 2009, Bill Baxter wrote:

> I'm not and expert in garbage collection but...
> An interesting point was made yesterday on the GDAlgorithms mailing
> list.  Acording to this one game industry veteran, you don't need a
> fully moving garbage collector to get many of the benefits.  If *some*
> of the memory can be moved around then often that's enough to fill in
> the gaps and keep fragmentation down.
> 
> So it may be worth while to have a special kind construct for
> containing data that the compiler is free to move around.  This type
> would have a hidden pointer inside of it that can be moved around by
> the gc, but applications would not be allowed to access that pointer.
>  And I suppose that means all access to the data would given via
> lvalue only.   Probably wouldn't take much on the part of the GC to
> provide the necessary hooks.  Just some sort of "relocatable alloc"
> call.  Rest could probably be handled in higher level libs.
> 
> But like I said I don't know much about GC.
> 
> --bb

And wouldn't ya know it.. I spent parts of saturday pondering on exactly 
how to implement exactly that.  I've got most of the code pictured in my 
head, but none of it written. :)

Maybe one day I'll make the time to try it.

Later,
Brad