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

[Andrew Coppin]

  On 15/10/2010 11:50 PM, Gregory Crosswhite wrote:
>  On 10/15/2010 03:15 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> 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...
>>
> Ah, but you are missing an important fact about the article:  it is 
> not about improving garbage collection for Haskell, it is about 
> improving collection for *Java*, which a language in heavy use on 
> servers.  If this performance gain really is such a big win, then I 
> bet that it would highly motivate people to make this extension as 
> part of the standard Linux kernel, at which point we could use it in 
> the Haskell garbage collector.

Mmm, that's interesting. The paper talks about "Jikes", but I have no 
idea what that is. So it's a Java implementation then?

Also, it's news to me that Java finds heavy use anywhere yet. (Then 
again, if they run Java server-side, how would you tell?)

It seems to me that most operating systems are designed with the 
assumption that all the code being executed will be C or C++ with manual 
memory management. Ergo, however much memory the process has requested, 
it actually *needs* all of it. With GC, this assumption is violated. If 
you ask the GC nicely, it may well be able to release some memory back 
to you. It's just that the OS isn't designed to do this, so the GC has 
no idea whether it's starving the system of memory, or whether there's 
plenty spare.

I know the GC engine in the GHC RTS just *never* releases memory back to 
the OS. (I imagine that's a common choice.) It means that if the amount 
of truly live data fluctuates up and down, you don't spend forever 
allocating and freeing memory from the OS. I think we could probably do 
better here. (There's an [ancient] feature request ticket for it 
somewhere on the Traq...) At a minimum, I'm not even sure how much 
notice the current GC takes of memory page boundaries and cache effects...

GC languages are not exactly rare, so maybe we'll see some OSes start 
adding new system calls to allow the OS to ask the application whether 
there's any memory it can cheaply hand back. We'll see...