On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Ken Fox wrote:
> John Tobey wrote:
...
> There's a lot of talk about doing a mark-sweep collector for perl,
> but I'm not sure adopting a 30 year old obsolete gc algorithm is
> such a good idea. Certainly we have to be careful about moving
> objects, but generational collectors have a lot of advantages we
> should consider. (A trivial malloc for any size object is the one
> that's probably most important for us: obj = heap_top; heap_top +=
> obj_size.) (I should say generational copying collector, since
> generational mark-sweep is also possible, but rare.) On the other
> hand, mark-sweep doesn't have the page thrashing problems of the
> simple hemi-space copying collectors. There was an Italian collector
> for C++ that had multiple arenas with different strategies for
> each arena. That might be a useful concept to adopt. (I'll try to
> dig up a reference.)
>
> - Ken
>
Yes, I've also read about arena style collectors, in reference to
smalltalk implementations, actually. They specifically had two major
arenas, once for short-term vars, and one for more persistant ones. They
used mostly reference counting on short term, and additional
marek-and-sweep style for the long. The benchmarks were greatly improved
by this division.
--Brock
