On 23-08-2012 15:21, Rory McGuire wrote:
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 2:51 PM, dsimcha <dsim...@yahoo.com
<mailto:dsim...@yahoo.com>> wrote:
Basically, the idea is to store information about what is and isn't
a pointer at the pool level instead of at the block level. My
attempt from a long time ago at precise heap scanning, and
Antti-Ville's first attempt, stored meta-data at the end of every
allocated block. This worked well for large arrays, but was
terribly inefficient for smaller allocations and made the GC code
even messier than it already is. The overhead was a fixed
(void*).sizeof bits per block. Now, each pool has a bit array that
contains one bit for every possible aligned pointer. The overhead
is always 1 bit for every (void*).sizeof bytes no matter how large
or small the block is.
Am I correct in thinking that this is still single threaded stop the world?
Yes, but parallelization of the mark phase is fairly trivial, and
something we should probably look into.
The GC will probably always be STW unless we get compiler support for
inserting GC barriers.
Any chance of the code being documented extensively in the hopes that it
would encourage participation/experimentation?
Thanks for all the work you guys have put in.
--
Alex Rønne Petersen
a...@lycus.org
http://lycus.org