[gambit-list] Real-time or generational gc?

Adam adam.mlmb at gmail.com
Mon Nov 11 07:01:26 EST 2019


Only to encourage the implementation of a STW(Stop The World)-free GC e.g.
like brooks pointers:

I agree that a program can generally be made to work seamlessly through
tweaks. Guillaume for instance has shown wonderful ability to tweak a
program to not display any STW:s during an animation for instance.

You know this already of course though I just wanted to put it in words,
while the argument that "STW:s can generally be tweaked away" is correct,
then I suggest an STW-free GC gives more generality as a program will be
STW-free without configuration or tweaks. Arbitrary application logics will
be STW-free, whereas today only some are.

Utility is primarily UI:s and there especially animations, but also network
interaction.

I'm fairly positive that recent computers with their bigger, faster caches
and faster RAM and more CPU cores, should be able to run an STW-free GC
with a small-to-unnoticeable footprint measured in wallclock time.

Thanks,
Adam

On Sun, 10 Nov 2019 at 11:08, Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> When I run your code translated to Gambit Scheme I indeed get GC pauses
> that increase up to ~600 ms, roughly doubling the pause time from one GC to
> the next (which makes sense because Gambit’s runtime system is roughly
> doubling the size of the heap at each GC and the number of live objects
> also doubles):
>
..

On Sat, 9 Nov 2019 at 21:34, Dimitris Vyzovitis <vyzo at hackzen.org> wrote:

> Are there any plans to implement a real-time or a generational gc in
> gambit?
> It would be nice to get thoz pause times down!
>
> -- vyzo
>
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