Using Boehm Garbage Collector with C Standard Library

When developing multi-threaded C applications, Boehm's conservative garbage collector can be useful for simplifying memory management. This raises the question of how to integrate Boehm GC with the C standard library's classes like std::map and std::vector.

One approach involves redefining the global operator ::new to use Boehm's implementation. However, a more straightforward solution is to explicitly specify the allocator template argument in the standard library collection templates.

For instance, to GC-allocate a vector of integers, one can use:

std::vector> my_vector;

The second template argument in std::vector is used to control the allocation of the vector's internal data structure, not the individual elements.

For std::string, using Basic_string with gc_allocator is an option:

std::basic_string, gc_allocator> my_string;

Alternatively, one can provide the array of characters directly with GC_malloc_atomic.

In summary, using Boehm GC with std::vector, std::string, and other standard library classes is possible by specifying the gc_allocator template argument. Redefining operator ::new is not necessary.