[gclist] Real-Time GC for high-level languages

[Krishnaswami, Neel]

Francois-Rene Rideau [mailto:fare@tunes.org] wrote:
> 
> Dear GC Listers,
> I'm looking for real-time memory management solutions so 
> as to develop embedded software using high-level languages. Is 
> there a compendium listing whatever language implementations, 
> GC libraries, etc, provide real-time behavior, preferrably hard 
> real-time? My employer is mostly interested in free software, 
> although we're also interested in knowing what proprietary is 
> available. We're also possibly interested in real-time malloc/free.

The MLKit Standard ML compiler has a region-based memory allocator 
that does no pointer tracing, so there are no unbounded pauses. (I 
think regions are typically called "arenas" by C programmers.) You 
can find the compiler at:

  http://www.it-c.dk/research/mlkit/

and there are also a number of papers describing the technique. The
developers advertise realtime programming as a possible application
domain for their compiler. However, I've never done any realtime
programming so I can't really evaluate the claim. 

--
Neel Krishnaswami
neelk@cswcasa.com