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NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2016 02:58:27 -0500
From: Gareth Owen <gwowen@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Extending C with GC?
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Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2016 08:58:26 +0100
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antispam@math.uni.wroc.pl writes:

> jacobnavia <jacob@jacob.remcomp.fr> wrote:
>> None since GC-pointers can't be stored in unions.
>> And they can't be assigned from normal pointers
>
> So you eliminate most interesting uses of GC.  GC is attractive
> when one has complicated data structure connected via pointers.
> If you forbid unions, then possible data structures are
> signifcantly restricted.

I'm sure that's your experience, but my experience is significantly
different. In all the code on which I've worked, unions are a fairly
niche data structure, mainly restricted to convenience device for
accessing memory mapped registers.