[gclist] RFC: New paper on Mostly-Copying Collection

[fms]

Greg Morissett and I recently finished a paper describing a new
mostly-copying collector, and giving a performance comparison to
Boehm-Weiser's conservative collector.  The paper is available for
comments at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/fms/Papers/mcc.ps as a
postscript file.
(The abstract is below)

We are particularly interested in your thoughts on the fairness of the
analysis, on the clarity of the presentation, on the merit of the work,
and on possible future directions.  Please don't hesitate to e-mail me
with any questions or comments  you may have.

Thank you.

Frederick Smith

Abstract:
Many high-level language compilers generate C code and then invoke a C
compiler to do code generation, register allocation, stack management,
and low-level optimization.  To date, most of these compilers link the
resulting code against a conservative mark-sweep garbage collector in
order to reclaim unused memory.  We introduce a new collector, MCC,
based on mostly-copying collection, and characterize the conditions that
favor such a collector over a mark-sweep collector.  In particular we
demonstrate that mostly-copying collection outperforms conservative
mark-sweep under the same conditions that accurate copying collection
outperforms accurate mark-sweep: Specifically, MCC meets or exceeds the
performance of a mature mark-sweep collector when  allocation rates are
high, and physical memory is large relative to the live data.