[E-Lang] Re: restricted concurrency and optimization (was Re: [E-Lang] E FAQ)

[Mark S. Miller]

At 09:40 PM Thursday 9/27/01, Wesley Felter wrote:
>This reminds me of some other thoughts I had about optimizing E runtimes.
>GC could be simplified if you know that all the code touching the GC heap
>is single-threaded. You could also avoid scanning the stack for GC roots
>by running the GC in between game turns (since there would be no E frames
>on the stack at that point). You wouldn't need complex thread-suspending
>logic or GC safe points in every loop.

Yes!  The only precedents I know for GCing only when there are no stack 
frames are Niklaus Wirth's Oberon system (which the world should have paid 
more attention to) and Udanax Gold/Purple 
http://www.udanax.com/gold/index.html http://www.sunless-sea.net/forum .  
Both are event-loop systems.

If you want to do this, the hard question is: What happens if you run out of 
space during a turn?  I believe the least bad answer is to have two garbage 
collectors.  Yuck.  But probably still wirth it. (Sorry)


        Cheers,
        --MarkM