On 25.01.2008, at 00:04, Evan Laforge wrote:
Well... ghc still has a single-threaded garbage collector, so all the "par" threads must stop for garbage collection. So scaling to the level of a cluster would be significantly sub-linear.
A real time incremental gc would be really cool. Some people claim they exist, but which languages have one?
james mccartney's supercollider [1] has a non-copying incremental collector based on [2], though not a parallel one. btw, is an implementation of the incremental collector described in [3] available somewhere? are there any plans to incorporate it into future ghc versions? <sk> [1] http://supercollider.sourceforge.net [2] P. R. Wilson and M. S. Johnstone. Real-time non-copying garbage collection. In ACM OOPSLA Wsorkshop on Memory Management and Garbage Collection, 1993. [3] A. M. Cheadle, A. J. Field, S. Marlow, S. L. P. Jones, and R. L. While. Exploring the barrier to entry: incremental generational garbage collection for haskell. In ISMM ’04: Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Memory management, pages 163–174, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM.