Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
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Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
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Re: Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
#2Crazy to me that garbage collection systems are a subject of continual evolution and discussion. You'd think it would be "solved" by now... Or is that just in Java world?
Re: Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
#3Crazy to me that garbage collection systems are a subject of continual evolution and discussion. You'd think it would be "solved" by now... Or is that just in Java world?
I'm not sure what "solved" would mean for GC. Can't there always be improvements in maintainability, pause duration, correctness, throughput etc. Many dimensions to continually improve on.
Unless someone comes up with a no pause, no compute power no code fully correct GC?
Re: Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
#4Crazy to me that garbage collection systems are a subject of continual evolution and discussion. You'd think it would be "solved" by now... Or is that just in Java world?
It’s just as “solved” as regular memory allocators are for C/C++ — it’s constantly evolving, with many competing solutions. TBB, tcmalloc, jemalloc, mimalloc, etc etc etc.
Memory management is hard, and in a world where memory sizes keep increasing, new techniques being developed is expected and perfectly normal.
Re: Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
#5Crazy to me that garbage collection systems are a subject of continual evolution and discussion. You'd think it would be "solved" by now... Or is that just in Java world?
I'm not sure what "solved" would mean for GC. Can't there always be improvements in maintainability, pause duration, correctness, throughput etc. Many dimensions to continually improve on. Unless someone comes up with a no pause, no compute power no code fully correct GC?
Java already has that GC, it's called Epsilon https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/epsilon-the-jdks-...
Re: Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
#6As a Clojure programmer, I'm so happy that I'm getting all these improvements over many years. It's fashionable to complain about Java — but I don't use Java, and yet I benefit from all the fantastic work that is being done on the JVM.
Re: Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what "solved" would mean for GC. Can't there always be improvements in maintainability, pause duration, correctness, throughput etc. Many dimensions to continually improve on. Unless someone comes up with a no pause, no compute power no code fully correct GC?
Java already has that GC, it's called Epsilon https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/epsilon-the-jdks-...
Epsilon doesn't GC at all?
Re: Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
#8Crazy to me that garbage collection systems are a subject of continual evolution and discussion. You'd think it would be "solved" by now... Or is that just in Java world?
Lots of things in CS are actually cyclic: RAM is expensive, implement swapping from HDD. RAM gets cheaper, load all data there and instead optimize your code for CPU. Data gets bigger, need to go back to swapping again. Suddenly we get SSDs and hard drive access is lots faster, invent something new but similar to the old stuff.
And so it goes, the bottleneck is always moved.
Re: Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation
#9Crazy to me that garbage collection systems are a subject of continual evolution and discussion. You'd think it would be "solved" by now... Or is that just in Java world?
Not an expert but bear in mind that there can't really be one single thing called a 'good' garbage collector, because the behaviour of the programs that produce the garbage can be hugely varied, and the garbage so produced can likewise be hugely varied, and how you want to recover it can depend on the platform you're running on (if embedded, you probably want reference counting the tight memory, in other circumstances you might be very happy just to leak everything and let the OS clean up at the end. Edit: yes, it's sometimes ok to leak).
As somebody says elsewhere, it's multidimensional issue and a single dimensional garbage collector can't be a brilliant match for everything.
The book "Garbage Collection" by Richard Jones, recently discussed on HN, is something I'd highly recommend you buy and read.