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Who would usually need this book?
Besides the great technical content, I found it to be a very enjoyable, readable book.
> I don't like garbage. I don't like littering. My ideal is to eliminate the > need for a garbage collector by not producing any garbage. That is now > possible.
and it's indeed possible. For example It's become pretty much a non-issue in modern C++: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48046118/1593077 (and C++ is not the only example, it's just a prominent example of a language which almost standardized garbage collection, but eventually did not go that way.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust also uses reference counting, probably the worst sort of garbage collection.
Tracing is the worst in terms of performance
if you need code to understand garbage collection, there is walkthrough of garbage collector and C code at http://maplant.com/gc.html is really helpful. I tweaked it to work on amd64 and started adding register scanning based on what eatonphil's discord people told me to do. https://github.com/samsquire/garbage-collector It's not fit for any purpose but more of a learning exercise.
Regarding register scanning in a conservative GC, Andreas Kling has made (or at least quoted) the amusing observation[2] that your C runtime already has a primitive to dump all callee-save registers to memory: setjmp(). So all you have to do to scan both registers and stack is to put a jmp_buf onto the stack, setjmp() to it, then scan the stack normally starting from its address.
[1] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-ga...
I feel the need for garbage collection is a language design mis-feature. That is to say, producing garbage is a language design-mis-feature. To quote Bjarne Stroustrup: > I don't like garbage. I don't like littering. My ideal is to eliminate the > need for a garbage collector by not producing any garbage. That is now > possible. and it's indeed possible. For example It's become pretty much a non-issue in modern C++:…
if you need code to understand garbage collection, there is walkthrough of garbage collector and C code at http://maplant.com/gc.html is really helpful. I tweaked it to work on amd64 and started adding register scanning based on what eatonphil's discord people told me to do. https://github.com/samsquire/garbage-collector It's not fit for any purpose but more of a learning exercise.
Bob Nystrom (of Game Programming Patterns , Crafting Interpreters , and dartfmt fame) also wrote a tutorial implementation[1], of a precise tracing GC as opposed to a conservative one. Regarding register scanning in a conservative GC, Andreas Kling has made (or at least quoted) the amusing observation[2] that your C runtime already has a primitive to dump all callee-save registers to memory: setjmp(). So all you have…