[mercury-users] string__first_char

[Fergus Henderson]

On 16-Oct-2000, Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > b) Garbage collection?
> 
> We generally run the Boehm et al conservative garbage collector in a
> mode in which it only follows pointers to bytes within the first word
> of an object; pointers into the middle of an object are ignored by the
> GC.  So although the GC doesn't require strings to be word aligned, it
> doesn't allow arbitrary pointers into the middle of strings, and so 

... and so operations like string__first_char would still need to make
copies, at least some of the time.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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