It's worth exploring, and may lead to other experiments in parallel GC..
Parrot allows multiple different GC systems, so you shouldn't encounter
significant problems on the Parrot side, but if you do, let us know and
we'll fix them. I don't know if Harmony's parallel GC was designed to be
plugged into other systems, though, so you may need to write a wrapper
around it (which may lose some of the speed gains).
Parrot's Artistic 2.0 license and the Apache 2.0 license are compatible,
so you'll have no trouble using them together. (Parts of Artistic 2.0
were directly inspired by Apache 2.0.)
Allison
Maria Fedotova wrote:
Hello folks,
I wonder if the community would be interested in attaching another
garbage collector to the parrot VM. For example, Apache Harmony
contains implementation of a parallel garbage collector [1] which is
quicker on modern multi-core and SMP systems.
If you think this may be technically feasible, I wonder if there are
any legal issues which prevent Apache-licensed component to be used
with the code licensed under artistic license.
I'm currently looking at tools/dev/mk_manifest_and_skip.pl to add GC
files to the build process. I'm also trying to dig up how
--gc=<config> option of Configure.pl works.
[1] http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/harmony/enhanced/drlvm/trunk/vm/gc_gen/
With best regards,
Masha
