1: Copyright 1988, 1989 Hans-J. Boehm, Alan J. Demers
    2: Copyright (c) 1991-1995 by Xerox Corporation.  All rights reserved.
    3: Copyright (c) 1996-1999 by Silicon Graphics.  All rights reserved.
    4: Copyright (c) 1999-2001 by Hewlett-Packard. All rights reserved.
    5: 
    6: THIS MATERIAL IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED
    7: OR IMPLIED.  ANY USE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.
    8: 
    9: Permission is hereby granted to use or copy this program
   10: for any purpose,  provided the above notices are retained on all copies.
   11: Permission to modify the code and to distribute modified code is granted,
   12: provided the above notices are retained, and a notice that the code was
   13: modified is included with the above copyright notice.
   14: 
   15: A few files have other copyright holders. A few of the files needed
   16: to use the GNU-style build procedure come with a modified GPL license
   17: that appears not to significantly restrict use of the collector, though
   18: use of those files for a purpose other than building the collector may
   19: require the resulting code to be covered by the GPL.
   20: 
   21: For more details and the names of other contributors, see the
   22: doc/README* files and include/gc.h.  This file describes typical use of
   23: the collector on a machine that is already supported.
   24: 
   25: For the version number, see doc/README or version.h.
   26: 
   27: INSTALLATION:
   28: Under UN*X, Linux:
   29: Alternative 1 (the old way): type "make test" in this directory.
   30:         Link against gc.a.
   31: 
   32: Alternative 2 (the new way): type
   33:         "./configure --prefix=<dir>; make; make check; make install".
   34:         Link against <dir>/lib/libgc.a or <dir>/lib/libgc.so.
   35:         See README.autoconf for details
   36: 
   37: Under OS/2 or Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, or 2000:
   38: copy the appropriate makefile to MAKEFILE, read it, and type "nmake test".
   39: (Under Windows, this assumes you have Microsoft command-line tools
   40: installed, and have DOS configured with enough environment space to run them.)
   41: Read the machine specific README in the doc directory if one exists.
   42: The only way to develop code with the collector for Windows 3.1 is
   43: to develop under Windows NT or 95+, and then to use win32S.
   44: 
   45: If you need thread support, you will need to either follow the special
   46: platform-dependent instructions (win32), or add a suitable define
   47: option as described in Makefile.
   48: 
   49: If you wish to use the cord (structured string) library, type
   50: "make cords". (This requires an ANSI C compiler.  You may need
   51: to redefine CC in the Makefile. The CORD_printf implementation in
   52: cordprnt.c is known to be less than perfectly portable.  The rest
   53: of the package should still work.)
   54: 
   55: If you wish to use the collector from C++, type
   56: "make c++".  These add further files to gc.a and to the include
   57: subdirectory.  See cord/cord.h and include/gc_cpp.h.
   58: 
   59: TYPICAL USE:
   60: Include "gc.h" from the include subdirectory.  Link against the
   61: appropriate library ("gc.a" under UN*X).  Replace calls to malloc
   62: by calls to GC_MALLOC, and calls to realloc by calls to GC_REALLOC.
   63: If the object is known to never contain pointers, use GC_MALLOC_ATOMIC
   64: instead of GC_MALLOC.
   65: 
   66: Define GC_DEBUG before including gc.h for additional checking.
   67: 
   68: More documentation on the collector interface can be found at
   69: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/gcinterface.html,
   70: in doc/README, and in include/gc.h .
   71: 
   72: WARNINGS:
   73: 
   74: Do not store the only pointer to an object in memory allocated
   75: with system malloc, since the collector usually does not scan
   76: memory allocated in this way.
   77: 
   78: Use with threads may be supported on your system, but requires the
   79: collector to be built with thread support.  See Makefile.  The collector
   80: does not guarantee to scan thread-local storage (e.g. of the kind
   81: accessed with pthread_getspecific()).  The collector does scan
   82: thread stacks though, so generally the best solution is to ensure that
   83: any pointers stored in thread-local storage are also stored on the
   84: thread's stack for the duration of their lifetime.
   85: