[Texmacs-dev] What remains to be done (GC)

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Concretely speaking, I think that the following should be done:

1) Encapsulate all pointers in the TeXmacs code in clean classes.
   This is mostly done by our pointer/representation mechanism,
   but it should be made fully systematic.

2) Identify all global variables, put them in appropriate classes
   when possible, and define them of being of type global<T>
   instead of T otherwise. Here "global" is a template class
   used for marking objects as starting points for the GC.

3) Implement debugging tools. For instance,
   a) An interface with GC for the detection of leaks.
   b) Implement double indirect pointer classes modulo a debugging flag.
   c) Tools for printing unaccessible objects.
   d) See what we can do with Valgrind.

4) Implement a full marking algorithm and a compactifying GC.

I think that steps 1, 2 and 3 would be good anyway. Before step 4,
we should contact Hans Boehm and thoroughly discuss the whole
issue through.