Re: Phase 1 of gcc-in-cxx now complete

[Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com>]

NightStrike wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 6:25 PM, Ian Lance Taylor<iant@google.com> wrote:
>> Richard Guenther <richard.guenther@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> All that above said - do you expect us to carry both vec.h (for VEC in
>>> GC memory) and std::vector (for VECs in heap memory) (and vec.h
>>> for the alloca trick ...)?  Or do you think we should try to make the GTY
>>> machinery C++ aware and annotate the standard library (ick...)?
>> I expect us to write a GC allocator, and use that with std::vector.
>> This will require more hooks into the GC code, but I think it is doable.
> 
> I'm curious about this.  I thought c++ wasn't a garbage collected
> language on purpose.  Why does GCC have one?  What purpose does it
> serve?  I'm not suggesting otherwise, but just trying to learn more
> about the way things are done.

This is for gcc's internal use, not for the users of gcc.  We have to
manage memory inside gcc somehow, so we use a garbage collector.

Andrew.