Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers

[Walter Bright]

On 4/9/2024 6:50 AM, Dukc wrote:
> If the write gate would just ignore any pointers not registered to the GC 
> it would probably continue to work with existing code with no changes other than 
> a slight slowdown.

This appears to require that the language would be cognizant of two different 
pointer types - gc pointers, and non-gc pointers. This concept was implemented 
in Microsoft's "Managed C++" language.

It's still in use, but I never hear anyone mention it. The two-pointer-type 
scheme is a massive increase in complexity that the programmer has to deal with. 
For example,

     int strcmp(char* s1, char* s2);

now requires 4 declarations (& means a GC pointer):

     int strcmp(char* s1, char* s2);
     int strcmp(char& s1, char* s2);
     int strcmp(char* s1, char& s2);
     int strcmp(char& s1, char& s2);

People dealt with multiple pointer types in the DOS 16 bit days, and I was very 
glad to be able to get away from that.