GC (Virtually Zero-Overhead Object Management)

[Sean Kelly]

zz wrote:
> While having a discussion about GC's with a friend, he brought up this 
> link which I found quite interesting (at the first reading) and I 
> thought others would also find it interesting.
> 
> I'm still very skeptical of the claims.

Don't be.  Chris Thomasson may talk a bit big at times, but he has a 
solid grasp of the problems involved and VZOOM has gotten a lot of 
attention lately from some pretty respectable sources (I think it just 
won some kind of award in a contest sponsored by Sun or some such).  I 
haven't given VZOOM a very close look myself, but what I've heard Chris 
say about it makes me believe that it probably lives up to his claims. 
What makes VZOOM so fast, from what I've heard, is that it almost 
completely avoids the use of memory synchronization instructions through 
the use of some clever tricks, along the lines of RCU + SMR.  Last I 
heard Chris was working on a lock-free GC which sounded fairly 
promising, though it was smart-pointer based and therefore not really 
suitable for D.


Sean