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

[Andreas Färber]

Hello,

Am 13.01.2009 um 21:10 schrieb Martin Smith:

> 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.

I have successfully used GC handles from Cocoa, locking and obtaining  
a pointer only when necessary.

Locking only when needed is important for the future "sgen" collector,  
which can thus move the objects around while they are not locked.

Andreas