Use Boehm garbage collector to replace reference counting

[Silenus-the-Companion]

I am not sure if this would work since I haven't fully explored the Boehm GC API- but potentially it could cope with the C stack problem since it has C stack inspection built in.

[Silenus-the-Companion]

An alternative to this would be to implement a custom garbage collector which would be more precise. This perhaps could be based on ldmuds mark/sweep implementation.

[thefallentree]

Tagging this as an architecture discussion rather than an actionable issue — labeled discussion and staged for GitHub Discussions (conversion is a sidebar-button action the API doesn't expose).

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Generated by Claude Code

[carterchengwn-byte]

I haven't thought about this issue in sometime but I suspect a precise garbage collector is a lot of work to maintain and implement properly for a project like fluffos since a lot of discipline is needed to "describe" the root set to the garbage collector. The problem and this is true for any garbage collection library is that the stack in C++ cannot be reflected upon even with the C++26 P2996 changes. Thus I think the boehm garbage collector might be the only option. I think there are just a few issues with adding it to the fluffos driver: 1) certain things like the argument and control stacks extants are dependent on where the current top of the respective stacks are- pointers in these stacks are part of the root set but the boehm gc library might need to be instructed to scan this dynamic region each time it runs the mark phase of the collection.

Anyone else with experience with garbage collection at all feel free to chime in here- I am only a novice at this (though I have read boehm's paper on the algorithm for conservative garbage collection which is quite old but describes the original implementation of the Boehm gc.

I think even if the gc is conservative with some work it could be a lot better than reference counting which is extremely error prone given you have to manually currently bump up and down the ref counts every time you start pointing to a piece of the heap.

As I said take all of what I write with a grain of salt. I haven't done much coding recently.