"Simon Marlow"
Nice trick. Unfortunately the same assumptions don't hold for GHC's garbage collector - objects are aged in the youngest generation, so it is usually at least two GCs before an object is promoted. We could still do the same trick, but instead we'd have to find maximum stack depth at which all objects below are in an older generation.
I don't know how to do it under these assumptions, i.e. how to find that depth.
Incedentally, how do you mark the stack depth? Overwrite a return address with a special one, and keep the real one around in a known place?
This is the first thing I tried :-) and even implemented it before I realized that it doesn't work under my assumptions. The problem is that I pass the return address in a virtual register, and it's saved on the stack by the callee only if it performs some non-tail calls. The return address is saved at the end of the stack frame. This means that a tail call followed by a non-tail call might read the special return address from the stack, but without jumping through it immediately. This return address is put again on the stack by a different function, with a possibly different stack frame size, so it lands in a different position on the stack, and thus it can't be found when GC wants to restore it. While changing the stack frame layout could perhaps make this workable, I found a much simpler solution. Since forever each stack frame contained a pointer used only by the GC and by stack trace printing. It points to a static structure containing the frame size and return address -> source location mapping. This pointer is now marked in the lowest bit by the GC. Pushing a fresh stack frame always puts an even pointer. BTW, a few days earlier I fixed a similar behavior for extensible arrays. Most mutable objects use a write barrier which stores changed locations, but arrays store references to changed objects because their payload is malloced and may be reallocated without a GC. This meant that code which repeatedly appends to a given array has O(N^2) complexity for huge arrays, as each GC scans the whole array. So I now store the size of the initial part of the array which is known to be unchanged since last GC. This is updated manually by particular operations. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk \__/ qrczak@knm.org.pl ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/