Re: broken GC

[Miroslav Silovic]

Michael Livshin <address@hidden> writes:

> Miroslav Silovic <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > I've been hacking a non-copying variant of TRAIN. No working code yet,
> > but it's been an easy-going code. However, what I have so far is not
> > optimised for a cell-based heap.
> 
> what is TRAIN?

It's the garbage collector for Beta language (just punch train garbage
collector into Google).

Basically it uses very small number of generations, but the oldest
generation is divided into constant-sized chunks. On each GC cycle,
you go through the early generation, and then process one chunk of the
last generation. All the objects from the chunk that are known to be
reachable are moved into the older chunks in such a manner that none
of these objects point into the older chunks any longer (that way you
eventually rid yourself of the circular inter-generation
pointers). The rest of the chunk is then swept. There's a bit more to
it than this summary, but Google should spit out the full article for
you.

-- 
How to eff the ineffable?