cx

Overview

This repository captures a series of small, focused C projects that build toward a tiny runtime for dynamically typed values and explore different memory management strategies. It starts with a resizable stack implementation, layers on a boxed Object abstraction that can store integers, floats, strings, and arrays, and then experiments with both reference counting and mark-and-sweep garbage collection to manage those values automatically.

Repository layout

Directory	Description
stack/	Array-backed stack with push, pop, and peek operations plus automatic capacity growth, used throughout the other experiments as a lightweight container.
object/	Core boxed value type that supports multiple primitive kinds, dynamically sized arrays, membership checks, and simple addition semantics shared by all later projects.
ref_count/	Extends the object model with per-object reference counts, safe decrement traversal, and a minimal set abstraction to prevent double frees when visiting cyclic graphs.
mark_sweep/	Implements a tiny virtual machine that tracks stack frames and heap objects, performing mark, trace, and sweep phases to reclaim unreachable data (including cyclic structures).

Each directory includes a main.c that exercises the module in isolation—handy for quick experiments or demos.

Building and running the demos

All projects rely on gcc and make. From the repository root you can build an individual demo by invoking make in its directory:

make -C stack
./stack/stack

make -C object
./object/object

make -C ref_count
./ref_count/refcount

make -C mark_sweep
./mark_sweep/mark_sweep

Each Makefile defines a clean target if you want to rebuild from scratch.