gc tweaks
Stephen Weeks
MLton@sourcelight.com
Wed, 22 Aug 2001 09:05:10 -0700
> I'm thinking of trying a simple re-write of the GC just to
> see what I can get from low level tweaks. For more serious stuff on the GC,
> it would be great if there were a bit in the header of objects that would
> tell me if it was mutable or not.
This should be easy enough to add.
> This could be used in two distinct ways.
> One would be for the generational GC, which needs to know about mutable
> objects. The other would be to implement something that I had in
> Mathematica: the `share' function. When you call it on a data object, it
> returns a copy of that object which maximizes sharing. In Mathematica, you
> could also call it on no arguments, which meant do this to the entire heap.
> This was great for saving space at judicious moments. (In Mathematica,
> although a real piece of junk, all the heap was immutable.)
share sounds cool. I wonder how much it would buy in the compiler itself.