[Haskell-cafe] realtime garbage collector for ghc (was: Why functional programming matters)

[Stefan Kersten]

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.