Multithreaded Garbage Collection on Linux

I tried compiling the Boomerang GUI on Linux last night. After much effort getting Qt4 to compile I was hopeful that everything would just work. Unfortunately the trick I used to get the garbage collector to only collect memory allocated by the decompiler thread on WIN32 doesn't work on Linux. Apparently you're supposed to call GC_pthread_create instead of pthread_create to start new threads, well I'm not calling either, I'm getting Qt to create my thread for me. So what to do? I guess I could modify Qt to use GC_pthread_create, but that means any binaries I distribute will have to include my modified Qt. I'm going to look into ways to register a thread with the allocator directly.

Another alternative is to just stop all this garbage collector nonsense, but modifying Boomerang to delete when appropriate is just out of the question. I have seriously considered using smart pointers, possibly from Boost, but as of yet I've not made a firm decision. It would be nice to remove the libgc dependancy, especially as I have been thinking of removing the libexpat dependancy recently.

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