Re: Anybody who wants to port Boehm-Weisser Garbage Collector?

In article <a5f9c604-8dab-4d61-b7aa-2d6b2587fc9f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
llothar <llothar@xxxxxx> wrote:
I think this is a critical piece of software because it is used by a
lot of applications and programming language runtimes.

Unfortunately only the most primitive mode is supported (single
threaded application - without any incremental) tuning.

Cool, go ahead and port what's missing.

I was really surprised about this fact. I don't have the time and do
not know anything about the OpenBSD memory system internals to do it.
So i would like to see somebody volunteer on this task.

And I would like $10 000, and ten sex bunnies.
I'm about as likely to get them.


There might also some kernel patching required as incremental garbage
collecting does only work well with some more information about the
dirty pages. WindowsXP offers an excellent "GetWriteWatch" feature to
do this, there is AFAIK nothing like it in the BSD world.

A few important hints.

- OpenBSD runs on a large variety of architectures.
- garbage collection is tough, especially in the presence of dynamic
loading, which is already a bitch to make it run.
- boehm-gc is not the best behaved piece of software. In fact, some parts
are about as readable as gcc + gdb combined. Especially the arch-dependent
maze.

So there you have it. Some talented people have looked at the issue. And
have spent the time to DO THE HOMEWORK to figure out why this is tough.

You haven't.

TANSTAAFL

.