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Wouldn’t the GC be able to just stop scanning memory once it encounters an off GC heap pointer (since it knows what address ranges it manages)? I’ve only alloc

Wouldn’t the GC be able to just stop scanning memory once it encounters an off GC heap pointer (since it knows what address ranges it manages)? I’ve only allocated non-pointer-containing Go objects manually (that presumably wouldn’t be scanned anyway) and it’s hard to find the specifics of how things work, although it seems like there are some libraries that allow it. [1] Since it’s possible to use C data structures and pointers directly from Go that seems like the safest way to do it, although of course then you need a C toolchain installed. [1] https://github.com/teh-cmc/mmm https://github.com/teh-cmc/mmm

pjmlp 6y ago
It is a bit more complicated than that, hence why conservative GC are pretty bad reclaiming memory, because they need to play safe. One of the reasons why they are changing the pointer rules in Go, was exactly because there are data races across domains if you happen to nest conversions between GC and non-GC pointers, and the GC happens to run just in the moment that it thinks the reference is no longer in use, while actually it was stored temporarily in an uintptr.