Hi Jonathan,

2018-07-19 8:33 GMT+02:00 Jonathan Fine <jfine2358@gmail.com>:

I call any such scheme BUFFERED multi-core reference count garbage collection. The worker processes know nothing about how garbage collection is managed. Instead, they pass over to the GC process sufficient information to allow it to manage the garbage.

This is actually a known idea (which is GOOD, unless you wanted to apply for a patent ;-) ).

It is described, among other places, in

"The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management",

by Richard Jones, Antony Hosking, Eliot Moss.

In fact, they also call it buffered reference counting.

Section 18.2: Buffered Reference Counting:

"...DeTreville[1990] had log mutators the old and new referents of each

pointer update to a buffer"

By the way, this book describes a ton of other ideas to speed up

reference counting in general and in the concurrent case, so

it may be worthwhile to get it.

I should warn you that many of these advanced refcounting ideas have been

proposed in the past already, although I am unaware of this particular technique

having been implemented.

Stephan