To Know A Garbage Collector
summary
Obsession leads to concrete work: implemented new GC algorithms in MRI Ruby inside a "notoriously insane" C codebase, compares results against experiments with Rubinius JRuby Haskell and cites the Garbage Collection Handbook and Bacon et al s unified theory; shows that subtle tweaks produce hybrid collectors, explains the undecidability of liveness as the fundamental limit, and reports which hybrid techniques (generational barriers, async marking, reference counting queues) actually reduce pause times and where cycles or conservatism still break things.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:41Talk Outline
- 2:30Introduction: Goals
- 3:12Influences
- 6:40Get Excited About Garbage Collection
- 7:46Terminology
- 8:26Heap
- 9:39Mutator
- 11:201960: A Good Year For Garbage Collectors
- 13:00Roots
- 13:57Mark and Sweep (Tracing)
- 18:43Barrier
- 20:20Reference Counting
- 22:55Pros And Cons
- 24:33The Unified Theory
- 29:56Programming Languages and GC
- 31:50Ruby
- 34:53Java
- 36:59Haskell
- 40:09In Conclusion
- 40:59Works Cited
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