Garbage Collection in rock
rock uses the Boehm GC. It is a conservative garbage collector that tends to play well with C libraries, hence the choice for a “compile-to-C” implementation of ooc.
Distribution
The Boehm GC (along with lib_atomic_ops) is vendored in rock’s repository,
under libs/. When building the compiler, rock’s Makefile will check for an
installed GC version and, if absent, it will compile its own.
Depending on your platform, the static version of the library compiled when building rock might be in the following places:
* Linux: `rock/libs/linux32` or `rock/libs/linux64`, as `libgc.a`
* OSX: `rock/libs/osx`
* Windows: `rock/libs/win32`
By default, rock links statically with the GC. However, for multithreaded applications on Windows, that might not be such a good idea. Read on for more details.
Disabling the GC
One can prevent rock from linking with the GC with the command line option --gc=off. Keep in mind
that the SDK was written with the GC in mind though.
When the GC is disabled, version(gc) block will get discarded, and version(!gc) blocks will be
used. You can use this to write both GC and non-GC friendly code.