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-The collector has at various times been compiled under Windows 95 & NT,
-with the original Microsoft SDK, with Visual C++ 2.0, 4.0, and 6, with
-the GNU win32 environment, with Borland 4.5, with Watcom C, and recently
-with the Digital Mars compiler. It is likely that some of these have been
-broken in the meantime. Patches are appreciated.
-
-It runs under both win32s and win32, but with different semantics.
-Under win32, all writable pages outside of the heaps and stack are
-scanned for roots. Thus the collector sees pointers in DLL data
-segments. Under win32s, only the main data segment is scanned.
-(The main data segment should always be scanned. Under some
-versions of win32s, other regions may also be scanned.)
-Thus all accessible objects should be accessible from local variables
-or variables in the main data segment. Alternatively, other data
-segments (e.g. in DLLs) may be registered with the collector by
-calling GC_init() and then GC_register_root_section(a), where
-a is the address of some variable inside the data segment. (Duplicate
-registrations are ignored, but not terribly quickly.)
-
-(There are two reasons for this. We didn't want to see many 16:16
-pointers. And the VirtualQuery call has different semantics under
-the two systems, and under different versions of win32s.)
-
-Win32 applications compiled with some flavor of gcc currently behave
-like win32s applications, in that dynamic library data segments are
-not scanned. (Gcc does not directly support Microsoft's "structured
-exception handling". It turns out that use of this feature is
-unavoidable if you scan arbirtray memory segments obtained from
-VirtualQuery.)
-
-The collector test program "gctest" is linked as a GUI application,
-but does not open any windows. Its output appears in the file
-"gc.log". It may be started from the file manager. The hour glass
-cursor may appear as long as it's running. If it is started from the
-command line, it will usually run in the background. Wait a few
-minutes (a few seconds on a modern machine) before you check the output.
-You should see either a failure indication or a "Collector appears to
-work" message.
-
-The cord test program has not been ported (but should port
-easily). A toy editor (cord/de.exe) based on cords (heavyweight
-strings represented as trees) has been ported and is included.
-It runs fine under either win32 or win32S. It serves as an example
-of a true Windows application, except that it was written by a
-nonexpert Windows programmer. (There are some peculiarities
-in the way files are displayed. The <cr> is displayed explicitly
-for standard DOS text files. As in the UNIX version, control
-characters are displayed explicitly, but in this case as red text.
-This may be suboptimal for some tastes and/or sets of default
-window colors.)
-
-In general -DREDIRECT_MALLOC is unlikely to work unless the
-application is completely statically linked.
-
-The collector normally allocates memory from the OS with VirtualAlloc.
-This appears to cause problems under Windows NT and Windows 2000 (but
-not Windows 95/98) if the memory is later passed to CreateDIBitmap.
-To work around this problem, build the collector with -DUSE_GLOBAL_ALLOC.
-This is currently incompatible with -DUSE_MUNMAP. (Thanks to Jonathan
-Clark for tracking this down. There's some chance this may be fixed
-in 6.1alpha4, since we now separate heap sections with an unused page.)
-
-For Microsoft development tools, rename NT_MAKEFILE as
-MAKEFILE. (Make sure that the CPU environment variable is defined
-to be i386.) In order to use the gc_cpp.h C++ interface, all
-client code should include gc_cpp.h.
-
-Clients may need to define GC_NOT_DLL before including gc.h, if the
-collector was built as a static library (as it normally is in the
-absence of thread support).
-
-For GNU-win32, use the regular makefile, possibly after uncommenting
-the line "include Makefile.DLLs". The latter should be necessary only
-if you want to package the collector as a DLL. The GNU-win32 port is
-believed to work only for b18, not b19, probably due to linker changes
-in b19. This is probably fixable with a different definition of
-DATASTART and DATAEND in gcconfig.h.
-
-For Borland tools, use BCC_MAKEFILE. Note that
-Borland's compiler defaults to 1 byte alignment in structures (-a1),
-whereas Visual C++ appears to default to 8 byte alignment (/Zp8).
-The garbage collector in its default configuration EXPECTS AT
-LEAST 4 BYTE ALIGNMENT. Thus the BORLAND DEFAULT MUST
-BE OVERRIDDEN. (In my opinion, it should usually be anyway.
-I expect that -a1 introduces major performance penalties on a
-486 or Pentium.) Note that this changes structure layouts. (As a last
-resort, gcconfig.h can be changed to allow 1 byte alignment. But
-this has significant negative performance implications.)
-The Makefile is set up to assume Borland 4.5. If you have another
-version, change the line near the top. By default, it does not
-require the assembler. If you do have the assembler, I recommend
-removing the -DUSE_GENERIC.
-
-There is some support for incremental collection. This is
-currently pretty simple-minded. Pages are protected. Protection
-faults are caught by a handler installed at the bottom of the handler
-stack. This is both slow and interacts poorly with a debugger.
-Whenever possible, I recommend adding a call to
-GC_enable_incremental at the last possible moment, after most
-debugging is complete. Unlike the UNIX versions, no system
-calls are wrapped by the collector itself. It may be necessary
-to wrap ReadFile calls that use a buffer in the heap, so that the
-call does not encounter a protection fault while it's running.
-(As usual, none of this is an issue unless GC_enable_incremental
-is called.)
-
-Note that incremental collection is disabled with -DSMALL_CONFIG.
-
-James Clark has contributed the necessary code to support win32 threads.
-Use NT_THREADS_MAKEFILE (a.k.a gc.mak) instead of NT_MAKEFILE
-to build this version. Note that this requires some files whose names
-are more than 8 + 3 characters long. Thus you should unpack the tar file
-so that long file names are preserved. To build the garbage collector
-test with VC++ from the command line, use
-
-nmake /F ".\gc.mak" CFG="gctest - Win32 Release"
-
-This requires that the subdirectory gctest\Release exist.
-The test program and DLL will reside in the Release directory.
-
-This version relies on the collector residing in a dll.
-
-This version currently supports incremental collection only if it is
-enabled before any additional threads are created.
-Version 4.13 attempts to fix some of the earlier problems, but there
-may be other issues. If you need solid support for win32 threads, you
-might check with Geodesic Systems. Their collector must be licensed,
-but they have invested far more time in win32-specific issues.
-
-Hans
-
-Ivan V. Demakov's README for the Watcom port:
-
-The collector has been compiled with Watcom C 10.6 and 11.0.
-It runs under win32, win32s, and even under msdos with dos4gw
-dos-extender. It should also run under OS/2, though this isn't
-tested. Under win32 the collector can be built either as dll
-or as static library.
-
-Note that all compilations were done under Windows 95 or NT.
-For unknown reason compiling under Windows 3.11 for NT (one
-attempt has been made) leads to broken executables.
-
-Incremental collection is not supported.
-
-cord is not ported.
-
-Before compiling you may need to edit WCC_MAKEFILE to set target
-platform, library type (dynamic or static), calling conventions, and
-optimization options.
-
-To compile the collector and testing programs use the command:
- wmake -f WCC_MAKEFILE
-
-All programs using gc should be compiled with 4-byte alignment.
-For further explanations on this see comments about Borland.
-
-If gc compiled as dll, the macro ``GC_DLL'' should be defined before
-including "gc.h" (for example, with -DGC_DLL compiler option). It's
-important, otherwise resulting programs will not run.
-
-Ivan Demakov (email: ivan@tgrad.nsk.su)
-
-