Fat references

Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>
Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:55:59 +0000

          From comp.compilers
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Re: Fat references gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2009-12-30)
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From: Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:55:59 +0000
Organization: Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
Keywords: code, GC
Posted-Date: 30 Dec 2009 02:05:12 EST

I've been working on a project called HLVM in my spare time:


    http://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/hlvm


One goal was to have fast interop with C, so I didn't want to copy the
traditional style of placing a header with GC metadata before every value
in the heap because that would require C arrays to be copied just to add
this header. I couldn't be bothered to allocate a separate header so,
instead, I pulled the GC metadata into the reference. So my references are
now "fat": a quadword of pointer to run-time type, array length or union
type tag, pointer to mark state and pointer to the actual data itself.


This actually works rather well except I sacrificed atomic read/write of
references. Has it been done before?


--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?u


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