My favorite story about garbage collection: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98...
They do that in other places.
As I heard the tale, on the Standard Missile, they don't recirculate the hydraulic fluid, they just spit out as the missile flies. It's a wonderful engineering solution.
And on the Falcon 9, the hydrocarbon fuel is used as hydraulic fluid, then just dumped back into the fuel tank.
I would call that a region-based memory allocator... Only that it has a single region, ever.
Or it's a generational garbage collector with the generation management and collection functionality omitted.
now that is what i call the ultimate in garbage collection technology
I wish the author section provided what production garbage collectors the authors worked on. There's plenty of nonintuitive things you can learn in the real world, so a book including those would be both interesting and useful.
I see that there is a section (relatively short) on real time GC. But for anyone who has read the Handbook, how much emphasis is placed on GC in constrained environments. I have fought the urge to implement a 3D, modern AA game with GC just to prove it is viable outside all but the most resource poor platforms or the most AAAAA, cutting edge, every cycle counted, hyper optimized game. But I am transitioning to a slightly less focused area of responsibility at work and may have some free time to prototype and this may be how I spend my winter and spring free time.
Not much. The book mostly covers theory and not platform-specific details. The explanations on various real-time gc algorithms are very thorough though.
Great book. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492307
(387 points, 166 comments)
I have this, it is very well written and thorough. Highly recommend!
I had Hosking as a professor. Iirc, it was an okay experience. Compilers course I believe.
When the handbook came out, I bought it because "hey, I know that guy". Ultimately, I don't think it's necessary, but having a more in depth knowledge of garbage collection and the problems in the space occasionally comes in handy.
For example, what implication do finalizers have on garbage collection design? Reading about that was kind of an eye opener.