Immix mark-region garbage collector
by Leandro Lucarella on 2009- 04- 25 20:39 (updated on 2009- 04- 25 20:39)- with 0 comment(s)
Yesterday Fawzi Mohamed pointed me to a Tango forums post (<rant>god! I hate forums</rant> =) where Keith Nazworth announces he wants to start a new GC implementation in his spare time.
He wants to progressively implement the Immix Garbage Collector.
I read the paper and it looks interesting, and it looks like it could use the parallelization I plan to add to the current GC, so maybe our efforts can be coordinated to leave the possibility to integrate both improvements together in the future.
A few words about the paper: the heap organization is pretty similar to the one in the current GC implementation, except Immix proposes that pages should not be divided in fixed-size bins, but do pointer bump variable sized allocations inside a block. Besides that, all other optimizations that I saw in the paper are somehow general and can be applied to the current GC at some point (but some of them maybe don't fit as well). Among these optimizations are: opportunistic moving to avoid fragmentation, parallel marking, thread-local pools/allocator and generations. Almost all of the optimizations can be implemented incrementally, starting with a very basic collector which is not very far from the actual one.
There were some discussion on adding the necessary hooks to the language to allow a reference counting based garbage collector in the newsgroup (don't be fooled by the subject! Is not about disabling the GC =) and weak references implementation. There's a lot of discussion about GC lately in D, which is really exciting!