Use Boehm

After saying that, & before talking about the details of Giggle, I'm going to tell you not to use Giggle. Don't use any garbage collection system that relies on smart pointers. Instead, use the Boehm collector.

Here's why:

• The Boehm collector provides better performance (speed) than a solution based on smart pointers is likely to provide. You can see my results in section 15. On a Red Hat 7 Gnu/Linux system I have at home, the Boehm collector is about 2.5 times faster than an explicit malloc/free algorithm. Run Giggle's bin/speed & see for yourself.

• The Boehm collector provides an alternative to malloc, so using it is easier. You don't have to write special code to use it. It even works with C.

• Any solution based on smart pointers will have semantic problems. See the paper ``Smart Pointers: They're Smart, But They're Not Pointers'', by Danial R. Edelson (1992), is an excellent explantion. Web links to the paper are available at http://www-sor.inria.fr/publi/SPC++_usenixC++92.html and http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/edelson91smart.html.

The Boehm collector is available on the Web at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/.