[gambit-list] Incremental garbage collector
Marc Feeley
feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Sat Dec 31 01:25:21 EST 2005
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
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