Re: [Nmh-workers] GCC 8 pre-releases have escaped...

[Ken Hornstein]

>i want to be sure you know you just said "we want MH to run on older 
>operating systems, not just the ones being installed today and in the 
>future." even microsoft's windows 10 ubuntu thingie can handle hboehm. 

Weeelll ... I don't think that quite captures my view.  It would be more
accurate to say, "Today, the people maintaining hboehm have ported it
to a large number of systems."  We have no guarantee that will continue
to be true.  And if we switch to using GC for memory management, it's
probably a one-way trip (and I don't see how we could reasonably make it
so a user gets to pick between garbage collection and explicit memory
management at compile time).  It took us a few decades to finally make
our libraries be agnostic to the stdio implementation; hitching our
wagon to a third-party GC library just seems like we'd be asking for
a similar set of headaches all over again.

--Ken