>My understanding of write barriers is as an optimization. That fits with my understanding of write barriers also. I do not know for certain but suspect that MMTK can somehow be configured such that write barriers are not required for correctness. Maybe Dan Feinberg can tell the mailing list.
So MMTK is a toolkit for building GCs. When doing generational collection the write barrier is used to keep track of pointers that go from older generations to yonger generations. You must have a way to track these objects because when you do a partial heap collection (aka just the nursery or nursery and old1) you need to build a root set of all things that point into that space. Then you trace this root set to find all live objects that need to be moved to an older generation. In other methods of collecting the write barrier is not as important. Here unless you can find all of these pointers that point into a space from an older space you must use a write barrier. Daniel --------------------------------------------------------------------- Terms of use : http://incubator.apache.org/harmony/mailing.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
