Incremental garbage collection

[rikki cattermole]

On 21/01/2022 3:17 PM, Brad Roberts wrote:
> To make any progress towards a better GC it's going to have to be 
> demonstrated.  And the proof will justify the changes.  If they're good 
> and the complexities required to get there aren't awful, then they'll 
> make into the code base.  If they're not, then they wont.  The status 
> quo is easy to get stuck in and help no one.
> 
> Someone with a good background in GC's needs to step up and be it's 
> champion.  I expect that several people would rally to help once some 
> basic momentum is established.  So, willing to be the rallying cry and 
> step up?

I've recently bought (but waiting on delivery) The Garbage Collection 
Handbook. It covers generational GC's, memory allocators (which is what 
I'm interested in) and like 13 pages on write barriers.

It would be an interesting experiment to see if we added a -enablewb 
flag and have it enable more GC options at runtime, if this allowed some 
better fitting GC's.