The garbage collector code is copyrighted by Hans-J. Boehm , Alan J. Demers, Xerox Corporation Silicon Graphics . It may be used and copied without payment of a fee under minimal restrictions. ANY USE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK . Exceptions are discussed in issues.html . The collector is not completely portable, but the distribution includes ports to most standard PC and UNIX platforms.
Some ports are more polished than others.
Win32 thread support appears to be getting more solid in the most recent versions. Kenjiro Taura, Toshio Endo, and Akinori Yonezawa have made available a concurrent collector based on this one. Their collector takes advantage of multiple processors during a collection. Starting with collector version 6.0alpha1 we also try to do this, though with more modest scalability goals. Our approach is discussed briefly in scale.html .