[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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