[Haskell-cafe] An interesting paper on VM-friendly GC

[Andrew Coppin]

  Somebody showed me this the other day, and I thought it was interesting:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/f034-hertz.pdf

Basically, "we designed a garbage collector which tries to avoid 
touching memory pages that have been swapped out to disk just because we 
need to do a GC sweep". Which is a pretty obvious thing to do, when you 
think about it, and has several obvious performance implications. Maybe 
we should think about how GHC handles this?

On the other hand, their implementation uses a modified Linux kernel, 
and no sane person is going to recompile their OS kernel with a custom 
patch just to run Haskell applications, so we can't do quite as well as 
they did. But still, and interesting read...