Re: GC and portability issues

[Matthew Flatt <mflatt@cs.utah.edu>]

Quoting Eric Dorland:
> The main problem seems to stem from the version of gc that is
> distributed  with the drscheme source is horribly out of date, and
> doesn't work on various architectures. I tried to get it to build with a
> more current version (5.3) as a shared lib, but there there were too
> many symbol differences between that one and the alpha version
> distributed with your sources.

There are also some changes that we've made to the library, mainly to
support a specialized finalization mode. I'm working on eliminating the
need for the special finalization, so evenatually MzScheme should work
with the standard collector library.

> Because of these problems (and it seems to broken on linux-m68k as well)
> drscheme will likely not make it into the next stable release of Debian
> (woody). I understand that v200 is rapidly approaching, and it would be
> a real boon if it would be possible to build it with a shared libgc as
> opposed to a static one.

It's going to take a little while longer to remove the special
finalization. Meanwhile, we're at least using the most recent version
of the GC.

Matthew