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Simpler Garbage Collection


From: David Chisnall
Subject: Simpler Garbage Collection
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 14:00:06 +0100

So, I've been thinking for a while that the implementation of GC that Apple seem to have settled upon is, to be polite, a complete disaster. The need for weak pointers means that it has no advantages over ref counting and lots of disadvantages.

One thing that Apple seem to have forgotten is that reference counting is a form of GC - replacing it with a tracing collector doesn't make much sense, especially if it's a very poor tracing collector, and adding GC to the compiler, rather than the library, goes against the spirit of Objective-C.

Reference counting works quite well, and doesn't have very large overheads (it also plays nicely with swapping, which tracing doesn't and leads to some quite pathological behaviour if you have low memory), but it has one significant flaw - it doesn't handle cycles. Adding a cycle detector to NSObject seemed like a better solution.

I recently came across a paper from 2001 which suggests exactly this. They observe that you only need to scan for cycles when -release is called and the retain count is > 0. They propose a very efficient algorithm for doing this, which we can make slightly more efficient (they suggest deferring the cycle detection. If we defer it until the current autorelease pool is popped then we can delete a load of objects that might have been cycles and carry on).

I have started implementing this, and it shows potential. For now, I will develop it in an external framework, and move it into GNUstep base later if other people are interested in it.

One other thing I have been pondering is altering the behaviour of NSAutoreleasePools so that:

1) +alloc adds the newly-created object to the autorelease pool.
2) -autorelease is a no-op
3) Objects are only free'd when their ref count is 0 and the top autorelease pool is pop'd.

This would make interacting with GNUstep from other languages (which expect full GC) simpler, and would simplify memory management since every created object would have a refcount of 1 (irrespective of how it was created) and autorelease would never need to be explicitly called.

Thoughts?

David




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