Exploring the barrier to entry — incremental generational garbage collection for Haskell (2004)
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| Venue: | In Int. Symp. on Memory Management |
| Citations: | 8 - 1 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Cheadle04exploringthe,
author = {A. M. Cheadle and A. J. Field},
title = {Exploring the barrier to entry — incremental generational garbage collection for Haskell},
booktitle = {In Int. Symp. on Memory Management},
year = {2004},
pages = {163--174},
publisher = {ACM Press}
}
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Abstract
We document the design and implementation of a “production” incremental garbage collector for GHC 6.02. It builds on our earlier work (Non-stop Haskell) that exploited GHC’s dynamic dispatch mechanism to hijack object code pointers so that objects in to-space automatically scavenge themselves when the mutator attempts to “enter ” them. This paper details various optimisations based on code specialisation that remove the dynamic space, and associated time, overheads that accompanied our earlier scheme. We detail important implementation issues and provide a detailed evaluation of a range of design alternatives in comparison with Non-stop Haskell and GHC’s current generational collector. We also show how the same code specialisation techniques can be used to eliminate the write barrier in a generational collector. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.3.4 [Programming Languages]: Processors—Memory management (garbage collection)
