That looks like the boehm GC, but Boehm is conservative. In no way is the Boehm GC that I'm aware of is generational or incremental (though it is mark-sweep).

That looks like the boehm GC, but Boehm is conservative. In no way is the Boehm GC that I'm aware of is generational or incremental (though it is mark-sweep). Start of long thread: https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-11/msg00551.html https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-11/msg005... "I was poking at alloc.c recently and realized that the existing conservative GC code is somewhat unsafe. In particular, 1) mark_maybe_pointer looks only for exact matches on object start. It's perfectly legal for the compiler to keep an interior object pointer and discard the pointer to the object start. 2) INTERVAL is GCed, but it's not represented in the memory tree: struct interval isn't a real lisp object and it's allocated as MEM_TYPE_NON_LISP. Even a direct pointer to the start of an interval won't protect it from GC. Shouldn't we treat intervals like conses? We've been getting by on dumb luck and the magnanimity of the compiler." Boehm was dropped for good reason.