>2. Will the Scheme runtime need something like Boehm's garbage collector?
I can't imagine why it would. It's fairly straightforward to have your
Scheme (or whatever) system maintain pointers into C land and vice
versa, with rather less magical support from the RTS than the Parc GC
gives (the system I've seen uses structures called "malloc" and
"stable" pointers, respectively, to point in each direction).
What GNUscript's RTS does absolutely need is a decent generational
garbage collector, so that it will provide reasonably sane interactive
performance. One of the things that regularly makes me want to kick my
workstation through a window is the GC and buffer relocation burps in
Emacs.
<b
-- Bryan O'Sullivan email: bos@cyclic.com, bosullvn@maths.tcd.ie Department of Poverty wuh wuh wuh: http://www.scrg.cs.tcd.ie/~bos Trinity College, Dublin nous n'avons qu'un peu de mouton aujourd'hui.