[boost] Is there interest for a small portable garbage collection library?

From: Achilleas Margaritis (axilmar_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-05-20 08:28:57

Dear boost developers,

Is there any interest for a small portable garbage collection library? I 
have written such a library to use for my personal projects and I would 
like to share it with the community, as I think it is very helpful in 
developing certain kinds of applications.

Features:

-small (under 2000 LOC)
-portable (no lowlevel OS/CPU/compiler-specific features)
-precise mark & sweep collection
-no dependencies; headers only
-weak pointers
-garbage-collected arrays
-customizable collector with user-defined finalizer and mark functions
-wrapper class for external non-garbage-collected classes
-thread-based collection

"Thread-based collection" means the library can only support 
thread-specific collectors. I did not want to introduce dependencies on 
specific threading libraries, as they vary from project to project (and 
if many threads compete for the same collector, applications tend to 
slow down). The library, as it is, provides a collector for the main 
thread, but the function that returns the current collector can be 
modified to return a thread-specific collector (using 
thread-specific-storage).

I have posted an article on www.codeproject.com about it along with the 
source code, code documentation and unit tests. It can be found here:

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/libgc.asp

I have also posted a file release on sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/libgc

I have tested the code (so far) in vc++ 7.1, but I think it will work on 
GCC and other compilers, as it does not use any O/S-specific and 
compiler-specific features.

Even if boost devs find no value in it, I would appreciate any feedback.

Thanks a lot for your attention.

Achilleas Margaritis