How can I provide garbage collection for an interpreted language implemented in C?

Question

If I were to implement a garbage collected interpreted language in C, how can I go about providing precise (i.e. not conservative) garbage collection without writing my own

Answer 1

When implementing such a language, your interpreter needs to keep track of all objects in the program it's running, including knowledge of their types and what part of the data is a reference to other data. Then it's trivial for you to walk all the data and implement whatever sort of garbage collector you like. No bogus hacks like trying to determine where the C implementation's "heap"/"stack"/etc. are located or guessing at what might be a pointer is needed, because you're dealing exactly with the data whose structure you know.