On 22-Dec-05, at 7:02 PM, Chris Newcombe wrote:
Marc,
I read your paper "A compacting incremental collector and its performance in a production quality compiler": www.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/papers/ismm98.ps.gz
- Is (or will) this incremental collector available for Gambit v4?
Soft-realtime behavior is important in my app.
- The paper is quite old. Does the description of the blocking
collector in section 3 still apply to Gambit v4?
(I only ask the second question because under "Main new features" in http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~boucherd/mslug/meetings/20040519/ mslug1.pdf.gz, it mentions "Better GC (safe for space)".)
The hybrid approach in this Erlang paper is interesting: http://user.it.uu.se/~kostis/Papers/ismm04.pdf
A more up-to-date description of Gambit's GC is
"A Case for the Unified Heap Approach to Erlang Memory Management" (http://www.erlang.se/workshop/feeley.ps)
It also compares Gambit's GC with the one used by Erlang/Hipe.
Unfortunately the incremental collector described in the ISMM98 paper has suffered from bit-rot, and is not distributed with Gambit. I may resurect the code if there is sufficient interest in this (I know some people are interested in developing video-games with Gambit, and an incremental GC would be very useful for this).
Marc