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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