Slightly off topic, but is there a good (i.e., fast and easy to use) modern retargetable GC for language prototyping/implementation? I've been looking for something like this for a while, but it seems everyone rolls their own.
But you also want fast, at which point you have to accept that fast gc == complicated and tightly coupled to the implementation details (object layout, type/debug info).
There is no pluggable GC. Conservative GCs (like Boehm GC) come the closest, but they have significant drawbacks (they blindly scan all of memory and can't tell a difference between a pointer and a random number that looks like a pointer, which means scanning&marking phase take longer and they keep objects that could have been freed, which is especially a problem on 32bits, where it's more likely that a random number points inside GC-managed heap).
To be fair, we do that to avoid GC slowdown issues. If the GC improves to the point where that's no longer an issue, we don't have to do that anymore :)
A 30% improvement is nice but nowhere near enough to change programming best practices in go.
A significant algorithmic change in the GC, like a generational compacting GC or something along those lines, would have to be made to alter go programming strategies.
Both. If you deal with a value type (struct or primitive) and never take the address of it, it can't exist anywhere besides the current stack, value types are copied if you return it out of a function or call another function with it.
For reference types, they do have escape analysis, not sure how one would compare it to another language.
I thought generational and mark/sweep were orthogonal. That is, can't generational still be mark and sweep? You just don't mark and sweep the entire reference set?
Generational collectors can pick any strategy for each of their generations. What to pick depends on language, and what characteristics you want to get easily.
My comment was a little flip, I know, I should have asked a more friendly question. I'm wondering why it hasn't been discussed (as far as I can tell). Java has had it for ages, Ruby will have it in 2.1 and Python appears to have it as well [1]. Isn't Generational GC feasible in Go for some reason?
Edit: Here is a discussion of gc in go. Go has only just gotten a precise collector, which is a requirement of a generational gc, to allow moving pointers.
I've heard talk of plans for a generational, moving GC in future. It's just not something that can be implemented overnight, especially in a language with internal pointers (which Java, Ruby and Python lack).
