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Boost provides free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries. We emphasize libraries that work

Copyright (c) 1988, 1989 Hans-J. Boehm, Alan J. Demers
Copyright (c) 1991-1996 by Xerox Corporation.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1996-1999 by Silicon Graphics.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1999-2005 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.

The file linux_threads.c is also
Copyright (c) 1998 by Fergus Henderson.  All rights reserved.

The files Makefile.am, and configure.in are
Copyright (c) 2001 by Red Hat Inc. All rights reserved.

Several files supporting GNU-style builds are copyrighted by the Free
Software Foundation, and carry a different license from that given
below.  The files included in the libatomic_ops distribution (included
here) use either the license below, or a similar MIT-style license,
or, for some files not actually used by the garbage-collector library, the
GPL.

THIS MATERIAL IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED
OR IMPLIED.  ANY USE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Permission is hereby granted to use or copy this program
for any purpose,  provided the above notices are retained on all copies.
Permission to modify the code and to distribute modified code is granted,
provided the above notices are retained, and a notice that the code was
modified is included with the above copyright notice.

A few of the files needed to use the GNU-style build procedure come with
slightly different licenses, though they are all similar in spirit.  A few
are GPL'ed, but with an exception that should cover all uses in the
collector.  (If you are concerned about such things, I recommend you look
at the notice in config.guess or ltmain.sh.)

This is version 7.0 of a conservative garbage collector for C and C++.

You might find a more recent version of this at

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc

OVERVIEW

    This is intended to be a general purpose, garbage collecting storage
allocator.  The algorithms used are described in:

Boehm, H., and M. Weiser, "Garbage Collection in an Uncooperative Environment",
Software Practice & Experience, September 1988, pp. 807-820.

Boehm, H., A. Demers, and S. Shenker, "Mostly Parallel Garbage Collection",
Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '91 Conference on Programming Language Design
and Implementation, SIGPLAN Notices 26, 6 (June 1991), pp. 157-164.

Boehm, H., "Space Efficient Conservative Garbage Collection", Proceedings
of the ACM SIGPLAN '91 Conference on Programming Language Design and
Implementation, SIGPLAN Notices 28, 6 (June 1993), pp. 197-206.

Boehm H., "Reducing Garbage Collector Cache Misses", Proceedings of the
2000 International Symposium on Memory Management.

  Possible interactions between the collector and optimizing compilers are
discussed in

Boehm, H., and D. Chase, "A Proposal for GC-safe C Compilation",
The Journal of C Language Translation 4, 2 (December 1992).

and

Boehm H., "Simple GC-safe Compilation", Proceedings
of the ACM SIGPLAN '96 Conference on Programming Language Design and
Implementation.

(Some of these are also available from
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/papers/, among other places.)

  Unlike the collector described in the second reference, this collector
operates either with the mutator stopped during the entire collection
(default) or incrementally during allocations.  (The latter is supported
on fewer machines.)  On the most common platforms, it can be built
with or without thread support.  On a few platforms, it can take advantage
of a multiprocessor to speed up garbage collection.

  Many of the ideas underlying the collector have previously been explored
by others.  Notably, some of the run-time systems developed at Xerox PARC
in the early 1980s conservatively scanned thread stacks to locate possible
pointers (cf. Paul Rovner, "On Adding Garbage Collection and Runtime Types
to a Strongly-Typed Statically Checked, Concurrent Language"  Xerox PARC
CSL 84-7).  Doug McIlroy wrote a simpler fully conservative collector that
was part of version 8 UNIX (tm), but appears to not have received
widespread use.

  Rudimentary tools for use of the collector as a leak detector are included
(see http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/leak.html),
as is a fairly sophisticated string package "cord" that makes use of the
collector.  (See doc/README.cords and H.-J. Boehm, R. Atkinson, and M. Plass,
"Ropes: An Alternative to Strings", Software Practice and Experience 25, 12
(December 1995), pp. 1315-1330.  This is very similar to the "rope" package
in Xerox Cedar, or the "rope" package in the SGI STL or the g++ distribution.)

Further collector documantation can be found at

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc


GENERAL DESCRIPTION

  This is a garbage collecting storage allocator that is intended to be
used as a plug-in replacement for C's malloc.

  Since the collector does not require pointers to be tagged, it does not
attempt to ensure that all inaccessible storage is reclaimed.  However,
in our experience, it is typically more successful at reclaiming unused
memory than most C programs using explicit deallocation.  Unlike manually
introduced leaks, the amount of unreclaimed memory typically stays
bounded.

  In the following, an "object" is defined to be a region of memory allocated
by the routines described below.  

  Any objects not intended to be collected must be pointed to either
from other such accessible objects, or from the registers,
stack, data, or statically allocated bss segments.  Pointers from
the stack or registers may point to anywhere inside an object.
The same is true for heap pointers if the collector is compiled with
ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS defined, or GC_all_interior_pointers is otherwise
set, as is now the default.

Compiling without ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS may reduce accidental retention
of garbage objects, by requiring pointers from the heap to to the beginning
of an object.  But this no longer appears to be a significant
issue for most programs occupying a small fraction of the possible
address space.

There are a number of routines which modify the pointer recognition
algorithm.  GC_register_displacement allows certain interior pointers
to be recognized even if ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS is nor defined.
GC_malloc_ignore_off_page allows some pointers into the middle of large objects
to be disregarded, greatly reducing the probablility of accidental
retention of large objects.  For most purposes it seems best to compile
with ALL_INTERIOR_POINTERS and to use GC_malloc_ignore_off_page if
you get collector warnings from allocations of very large objects.
See README.debugging for details.

  WARNING: pointers inside memory allocated by the standard "malloc" are not
seen by the garbage collector.  Thus objects pointed to only from such a
region may be prematurely deallocated.  It is thus suggested that the
standard "malloc" be used only for memory regions, such as I/O buffers, that
are guaranteed not to contain pointers to garbage collectable memory.
Pointers in C language automatic, static, or register variables,
are correctly recognized.  (Note that GC_malloc_uncollectable has semantics
similar to standard malloc, but allocates objects that are traced by the
collector.)

  WARNING: the collector does not always know how to find pointers in data
areas that are associated with dynamic libraries.  This is easy to
remedy IF you know how to find those data areas on your operating
system (see GC_add_roots).  Code for doing this under SunOS, IRIX 5.X and 6.X,
HP/UX, Alpha OSF/1, Linux, and win32 is included and used by default.  (See
README.win32 for win32 details.)  On other systems pointers from dynamic
library data areas may not be considered by the collector.
If you're writing a program that depends on the collector scanning
dynamic library data areas, it may be a good idea to include at least
one call to GC_is_visible() to ensure that those areas are visible
to the collector.

  Note that the garbage collector does not need to be informed of shared
read-only data.  However if the shared library mechanism can introduce
discontiguous data areas that may contain pointers, then the collector does
need to be informed.

  Signal processing for most signals may be deferred during collection,
and during uninterruptible parts of the allocation process.
Like standard ANSI C mallocs, by default it is unsafe to invoke
malloc (and other GC routines) from a signal handler while another
malloc call may be in progress. Removing -DNO_SIGNALS from Makefile
attempts to remedy that.  But that may not be reliable with a compiler that
substantially reorders memory operations inside GC_malloc.

  The allocator/collector can also be configured for thread-safe operation.
(Full signal safety can also be achieved, but only at the cost of two system
calls per malloc, which is usually unacceptable.)
WARNING: the collector does not guarantee to scan thread-local storage
(e.g. of the kind accessed with pthread_getspecific()).  The collector
does scan thread stacks, though, so generally the best solution is to
ensure that any pointers stored in thread-local storage are also
stored on the thread's stack for the duration of their lifetime.
(This is arguably a longstanding bug, but it hasn't been fixed yet.)

INSTALLATION AND PORTABILITY

  As distributed, the collector operates silently
In the event of problems, this can usually be changed by defining the
GC_PRINT_STATS or GC_PRINT_VERBOSE_STATS environment variables.  This
will result in a few lines of descriptive output for each collection.
(The given statistics exhibit a few peculiarities.
Things don't appear to add up for a variety of reasons, most notably
fragmentation losses.  These are probably much more significant for the
contrived program "test.c" than for your application.)

  On most Un*x-like platforms, the collector can be built either using a
GNU autoconf-based build infrastructure (type "configure; make" in the
simplest case), or with a classic makefile by itself (type
"cp Makefile.direct Makefile; make").  Here we focus on the latter option.
On other platforms, typically only the latter option is available, though
with a different supplied Makefile.)

  Typing "make test" nstead of "make" will automatically build the collector
and then run setjmp_test and gctest. Setjmp_test will give you information
about configuring the collector, which is useful primarily if you have
a machine that's not already supported.  Gctest is a somewhat superficial
test of collector functionality.  Failure is indicated by a core dump or
a message to the effect that the collector is broken.  Gctest takes about 
a second to two to run on reasonable 2007 vintage desktops.
It may use up to about 30MB of memory.  (The
multi-threaded version will use more.  64-bit versions may use more.)
"Make test" will also, as its last step, attempt to build and test the
"cord" string library.)

  The Makefile will generate a library gc.a which you should link against.
Typing "make cords" will add the cord library to gc.a.
Note that this requires an ANSI C compiler.

  It is suggested that if you need to replace a piece of the collector
(e.g. GC_mark_rts.c) you simply list your version ahead of gc.a on the
ld command line, rather than replacing the one in gc.a.  (This will
generate numerous warnings under some versions of AIX, but it still
works.)

  All include files that need to be used by clients will be put in the
include subdirectory.  (Normally this is just gc.h.  "Make cords" adds
"cord.h" and "ec.h".)

  The collector currently is designed to run essentially unmodified on
machines that use a flat 32-bit or 64-bit address space.
That includes the vast majority of Workstations and X86 (X >= 3) PCs.
(The list here was deleted because it was getting too long and constantly
out of date.)

  In a few cases (Amiga, OS/2, Win32, MacOS) a separate makefile
or equivalent is supplied.  Many of these have separate README.system
files.

  Dynamic libraries are completely supported only under SunOS/Solaris,
(and even that support is not functional on the last Sun 3 release),
Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, IRIX 5&6, HP/UX, Win32 (not Win32S) and OSF/1
on DEC AXP machines plus perhaps a few others listed near the top
of dyn_load.c.  On other machines we recommend that you do one of
the following:

  1) Add dynamic library support (and send us the code).
  2) Use static versions of the libraries.
  3) Arrange for dynamic libraries to use the standard malloc.
     This is still dangerous if the library stores a pointer to a
     garbage collected object.  But nearly all standard interfaces
     prohibit this, because they deal correctly with pointers
     to stack allocated objects.  (Strtok is an exception.  Don't
     use it.)

  In all cases we assume that pointer alignment is consistent with that
enforced by the standard C compilers.  If you use a nonstandard compiler
you may have to adjust the alignment parameters defined in gc_priv.h.
Note that this may also be an issue with packed records/structs, if those
enforce less alignment for pointers.

  A port to a machine that is not byte addressed, or does not use 32 bit
or 64 bit addresses will require a major effort.  A port to plain MSDOS
or win16 is hard.

  For machines not already mentioned, or for nonstandard compilers,
some porting suggestions are provided in the "porting.html" file.

THE C INTERFACE TO THE ALLOCATOR

  The following routines are intended to be directly called by the user.
Note that usually only GC_malloc is necessary.  GC_clear_roots and GC_add_roots
calls may be required if the collector has to trace from nonstandard places
(e.g. from dynamic library data areas on a machine on which the