GC (Virtually Zero-Overhead Object Management)

Craig Black cblack at ara.com
Wed Nov 29 10:46:35 PST 2006


"Sean Kelly" <sean at f4.ca> wrote in message 
news:ekkja0$i6p$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
> Craig Black wrote:
>> "Sean Kelly" <sean at f4.ca> wrote in message 
>> news:ekiu16$1ndk$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
>>> 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.
>>
>> Why not?  If someone has discovered a good GC solution via smart pointers 
>> and reference counting, why couldn't D leverage this new technology 
>> somehow?
>
> I suppose it depends how the smart pointers are implemented.  As D doesn't 
> support copy semantics for objects, there is really no way to implement 
> traditional smart pointers.  Rather, the reference counting has to be done 
> somewhat manually.

Right.  I forgot about that.  Specifically, what language features would 
have to be in place to provide for this?

-Craig 





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