Re: P-Source: A Guide to the Apple Pascal System

Eric wrote:

On Nov 27, 12:38 am, David Schmenk <dschm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As soon as I finish working out some issues with the garbage
collector (I don't like automatic garbage collectors) I should have
something to try out.

I assume you've studied NanoVM. That takes a lot of liberties that
work great on a small machine but wouldn't (or couldn't) work well on
a larger machine. The way he uses the high bit of an integer or object
reference to indicate whether it needs to be collected is both
ingenoius and perhaps dangerous. You then have only 15 bit integers
instead of 16 bit integers and that can lead to buggy code.

FWIW, using N-1 bit integers so the high-bit can be used by the
garbage-collector was just mentioned today in the "Incrementally
implementing a simple ML compiler using LLVM" thread in comp.compilers. :)

--
-- Jerry
.