Re: Garbage collection for system programming

On Monday 28 Feb 2005 6:00 am, you wrote:
> There's an old joke about a tennis playing robot programmed in Lisp
> that has an unfortunate habit of GC-ing after the backswing. You can
> certainly make rules about time critical code not calling routines
> that might provoke GC but that recreates the programming problems that
> GC is there to solve. -John]


On-the-fly garbage collection algorithms have been around since at
least 1978 where the garbage collector runs as a parallel process to
the main program. ("On-the-fly garbage collection: an exercise in
cooperation", E.W.Dijkstra et al, CACM Vol 21, Issue 11, Nov 1978, pp
966-975).


With a multi-ocre CPU it should be possible to do garbage collection
with practically zero overhead.


--
Martin


Martin.Ward@durham.ac.uk http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/ Erdos number: 4
G.K.Chesterton web site: http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/

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