From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)
To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org, tej@melbpc.org.au
Subject: Re: Garbage Collection
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 04:57:00 -0000
Message-id: <20020831115757.62F37F2D75@nile.gnat.com>
X-SW-Source: 2002-08/msg01997.html

<<1. Their garbage collection guy worked on GC for 8 years straight, full time.
Getting it right is tough.
>>

One useful source of information here is all the published work on Algol-68
which was the first general purpose language to require garbage collection.
A lot of useful and relevant work was published (unfortunately some of the
key references are in Dutch :-)

True, the concern with L2 cache did not exist there, but Algol-68 did
have full tasking (multiple threads with syncrhonization), so the real
time aspects of GCC were addressed in detail.

I see a lot of reinventing the wheel going on since Java. Reminds me of
when IBM introduced virtual memory, and someone asked if they had looked
at Atlas. The IBM spokesperson basically answered that they were too busy
implementing solutions to have time to look at what others had done :-)