[Mono-osx] Objective-C and Mono's GC

[Duane Wandless]

I think I understand your problem... but it might be different than what I
encountered.  Basically there are issues with the GC collectors of both C#
and Obj-C.   Neither knows about objects created in the other world.  In my
application I have an Obj-C application that runs and embeds Mono.  The Mono
code creates lots of C# objects.  When the GC from Obj-C runs it destroys my
C# objects that are created using Monobjc, or mobjc (which is faster and a
smaller memory footprint).

The basic recommendation is don't use the Obj-C GC when embedding Mono.  So
what I did was:  in my constructor for my C# objects I send an event to the
Obj-C world to add the object to a list.  Then in the deconstructor I
release them from the Obj-C list.  This allows the use of the Obj-C GC.

Best of luck.

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Martin Smith <martin.smith.jr at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> We are working on an application where we're embedding Mono in an
> Objective-C application.  One of the issues that we're seeing is that if the
> GC does not "see" pointers that are stored in Objective-C objects.  The side
> effect is that when we run our applications, the Obj-C objects will have
> instance variables that will eventually raise a SIGSEV
> (NullReferenceException) whenever the garbage collector runs.
>
> Does anyone else have experience with this problem?  I know one of the
> things we could probably do is maintain a data structure that stores all the
> "live" mono pointers and then write smart pointer classes that explicitly
> maintained ref counts on these objects, but I'm wondering if there's an
> easier way.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Martin
>
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