1 Copyright 1988, 1989 Hans-J. Boehm, Alan J. Demers
2 Copyright (c) 1991-1995 by Xerox Corporation. All rights reserved.
3 Copyright (c) 1996-1999 by Silicon Graphics. All rights reserved.
4 Copyright (c) 1999-2001 by Hewlett-Packard. All rights reserved.
6 THIS MATERIAL IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED
7 OR IMPLIED. ANY USE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.
9 Permission is hereby granted to use or copy this program
10 for any purpose, provided the above notices are retained on all copies.
11 Permission to modify the code and to distribute modified code is granted,
12 provided the above notices are retained, and a notice that the code was
13 modified is included with the above copyright notice.
15 A few files have other copyright holders. A few of the files needed
16 to use the GNU-style build procedure come with a modified GPL license
17 that appears not to significantly restrict use of the collector, though
18 use of those files for a purpose other than building the collector may
19 require the resulting code to be covered by the GPL.
21 For more details and the names of other contributors, see the
22 doc/README* files and include/gc.h. This file describes typical use of
23 the collector on a machine that is already supported.
25 For the version number, see doc/README or version.h.
29 Alternative 1 (the old way): type "make test" in this directory.
32 Alternative 2 (the new way): type
33 "./configure --prefix=<dir>; make; make check; make install".
34 Link against <dir>/lib/libgc.a or <dir>/lib/libgc.so.
35 See README.autoconf for details
37 Under OS/2 or Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, or 2000:
38 copy the appropriate makefile to MAKEFILE, read it, and type "nmake test".
39 (Under Windows, this assumes you have Microsoft command-line tools
40 installed, and have DOS configured with enough environment space to run them.)
41 Read the machine specific README in the doc directory if one exists.
42 The only way to develop code with the collector for Windows 3.1 is
43 to develop under Windows NT or 95+, and then to use win32S.
45 If you need thread support, you will need to either follow the special
46 platform-dependent instructions (win32), or add a suitable define
47 option as described in Makefile.
49 If you wish to use the cord (structured string) library, type
50 "make cords". (This requires an ANSI C compiler. You may need
51 to redefine CC in the Makefile. The CORD_printf implementation in
52 cordprnt.c is known to be less than perfectly portable. The rest
53 of the package should still work.)
55 If you wish to use the collector from C++, type
56 "make c++". These add further files to gc.a and to the include
57 subdirectory. See cord/cord.h and include/gc_cpp.h.
60 Include "gc.h" from the include subdirectory. Link against the
61 appropriate library ("gc.a" under UN*X). Replace calls to malloc
62 by calls to GC_MALLOC, and calls to realloc by calls to GC_REALLOC.
63 If the object is known to never contain pointers, use GC_MALLOC_ATOMIC
66 Define GC_DEBUG before including gc.h for additional checking.
68 More documentation on the collector interface can be found at
69 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/gcinterface.html,
70 in doc/README, and in include/gc.h .
74 Do not store the only pointer to an object in memory allocated
75 with system malloc, since the collector usually does not scan
76 memory allocated in this way.
78 Use with threads may be supported on your system, but requires the
79 collector to be built with thread support. See Makefile. The collector
80 does not guarantee to scan thread-local storage (e.g. of the kind
81 accessed with pthread_getspecific()). The collector does scan
82 thread stacks though, so generally the best solution is to ensure that
83 any pointers stored in thread-local storage are also stored on the
84 thread's stack for the duration of their lifetime.