On 2011-07-19, at 5:29 PM, Hendrik Boom wrote:
The world has long needed a good, practical, flexible GC that can handle parallelism. The days that each programming language had to have its owm specialized and incompatible GC should be numbered. But running the GC in parallel with the program it's collecting is costly without hardware support.
I'm not sure what you mean. Which hardware support? You mean special assembly instructions? That's doable in C with #ifdefs and inline "asm".
The C-- project has some ideas how to manage the interface between a GC and its language. They may be right on how to do it, but I don't think their interfacing has yet been tested on anything parallel.
I followed the C-- project way back when it started, and the last time I checked (2006) it hadn't lived up to all the hype. The project seems pretty dead at this point.
Marc