State of parallel GC?

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Ravi Nanavati wrote:

> It isn't an immediately pressing need a Bluespec, but we do get asked
> every once in a while about parallelizing the Bluespec compiler. 

Roshan James was working on parallel GC at MSR Cambridge last year. 
Unfortunately, it's not an internship-sized project.

> One
> of the technical reasons we're holding off on that front is that it
> wouldn't win as much as people expect (because garbage collection is
> usually a decent fraction of a typical run), so we'd be interested if
> the state-of-play in that area changed.

I think that the need for it will become more pressing among GHC's 
developers as the NPH work matures, as the current GC reduces 
performance even on two CPUs.  The need to publish good numbers is 
always a helpful motivator :-)

	<b