Building the Next-Generation Garbage Collector in Ruby
summary
MMTK is integrated into Ruby via a Rust-backed runtime and a C binding that adds a fast-path bump-pointer allocator, plus support for moving Immix and a new Ruby heap growth policy. Benchmarks show parallel MMTK drops a GC cycle from 38.5ms to 11.9ms on 16 threads; current Ruby MMTK runs ActiveRecord ~233ms versus Ruby’s 148ms and uses ~86MB vs 68MB, so work remains on generational (sticky) Immix, finer-grained parallel work, and JIT-inlinable allocation.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:27Ruby's garbage collector
- 6:23Modular garbage collector
- 7:26MMTK overview
- 8:31MMTK advantages
- 12:24MMTK improvements
- 13:05Moving Immix
- 14:51Bump pointer allocator
- 19:10Ruby heap growth
- 23:27Future improvements
- 28:41Conclusion and Q&A
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