• BLS (21/21) Sep 08 2008 Slightly OT, but may-be interesting for the D/LLVM folks
• Chris R. Miller (4/31) Sep 08 2008 Am I reading that right? A garbage collector that wouldn't have to
• Sean Kelly (5/9) Sep 08 2008 There are GCs that don't have to suspend any threads: incremental GCs.
• Robert Jacques (7/9) Sep 08 2008 No, concurrent GCs still have to suspend the runtime, they just have to ...
• renoX (11/22) Sep 19 2008 Note that even though the concurrent GC scales well with multiples core
• Robert Jacques (3/7) Sep 19 2008 I'd also add support for ownership types (i.e. shared / local) to that

BLS <nanali nospam-wanadoo.fr> writes:

Slightly OT, but may-be interesting for the D/LLVM folks

OCaml comes along now with a parallel garbage collector ... well let's 
have a look :
OCaml on *eight cores* http://planet.ocamlcore.org/


quote :
/
Fortunately, Jane St. Capital (one of the largest industrial users of 
OCaml) have chosen to fund a "multicore" summer project that aims to 
provide a basic concurrent garbage collector implementation for OCaml. 
The team from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, led by Emmanuel 
Chailloux, intend to complete this project during the summer of 2008.

********************

We have already written to team to suggest that they might also make 
their run-time compatible with the excellent LLVM project because this 
would make it much easier for open source developers to reuse this 
exciting technology.
/
http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2008/04/ocaml-to-get-concurrent-garbage.html

bjoern
and folks, beside : D at TIOBE is a joke. Search for OCaml jobs or who 
is using OCaml.

"Chris R. Miller" <lordSaurontheGreat gmail.com> writes:

BLS wrote:
 Slightly OT, but may-be interesting for the D/LLVM folks
=20
 OCaml comes along now with a parallel garbage collector ... well let's
 have a look :
 OCaml on *eight cores* http://planet.ocamlcore.org/
=20
=20
 quote :
 /
 Fortunately, Jane St. Capital (one of the largest industrial users of
 OCaml) have chosen to fund a "multicore" summer project that aims to
 provide a basic concurrent garbage collector implementation for OCaml.
 The team from the Universit=E9 Pierre et Marie Curie, led by Emmanuel
 Chailloux, intend to complete this project during the summer of 2008.
=20
 ********************
=20
 We have already written to team to suggest that they might also make
 their run-time compatible with the excellent LLVM project because this
 would make it much easier for open source developers to reuse this
 exciting technology.
 /
 http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2008/04/ocaml-to-get-concurrent-garbage.h=

tml
=20
 bjoern
 and folks, beside : D at TIOBE is a joke. Search for OCaml jobs or who
 is using OCaml.

Am I reading that right?  A garbage collector that wouldn't have to
suspend the runtime?  Or just one that plays nice with threads?

Sean Kelly <sean invisibleduck.org> writes:

Chris R. Miller wrote:
 
 Am I reading that right?  A garbage collector that wouldn't have to
 suspend the runtime?  Or just one that plays nice with threads?
 

There are GCs that don't have to suspend any threads: incremental GCs. 
But they need language support to work... and I'm not sure the concept 
really fits in a systems language.


Sean

"Robert Jacques" <sandford jhu.edu> writes:

On Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:05:42 -0400, Chris R. Miller  
<lordSaurontheGreat gmail.com> wrote:
 Am I reading that right?  A garbage collector that wouldn't have to
 suspend the runtime?  Or just one that plays nice with threads?

No, concurrent GCs still have to suspend the runtime, they just have to do  
it a lot less. Generally, they only suspend threads twice to read only the  
stack during each pass. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)#Stop-the-world_vs._incremental_vs._concurrent
Or any articles on the Java GC.

renoX <renosky free.fr> writes:

Robert Jacques a écrit :
 On Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:05:42 -0400, Chris R. Miller 
 <lordSaurontheGreat gmail.com> wrote:
 Am I reading that right?  A garbage collector that wouldn't have to
 suspend the runtime?  Or just one that plays nice with threads?

 
 No, concurrent GCs still have to suspend the runtime, they just have to 
 do it a lot less. Generally, they only suspend threads twice to read 
 only the stack during each pass. See
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)#Stop-the-world_vs._increm
ntal_vs._concurrent 
 
 Or any articles on the Java GC.

Note that even though the concurrent GC scales well with multiples core 
(contrary to normal GC), AFAIK most of them are not real-time so you 
wouldn't want to use them for say a game for example.

IBM has made a real time Java GC, but they didn't talk about parallelism 
so I guess that it doesn't scale well.

The 'ideal GC' must have so many properties: concurrent, incremental, 
scalable, real-time, VM-aware (so that its performance stays correct 
even with swapping), precise, compacting (to reduce trashing caused by 
leaks) AND still being somewhat efficient in memory and CPU usage..

renoX

"Robert Jacques" <sandford jhu.edu> writes:

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:21:32 -0400, renoX <renosky free.fr> wrote:

 The 'ideal GC' must have so many properties: concurrent, incremental,  
 scalable, real-time, VM-aware (so that its performance stays correct  
 even with swapping), precise, compacting (to reduce trashing caused by  
 leaks) AND still being somewhat efficient in memory and CPU usage..

I'd also add support for ownership types (i.e. shared / local) to that  
list although it's kinda part of scalable.