[gclist] Sharing GC resources between applications

[C H Forsyth]

>>Would it be possible to share a single garbage collected heap between
processes?

from the start (ca. 1995) Inferno provided an operating system
layer, whether on bare hardware or atop another operating
system.  thus, it has just `processes' for
its virtual machine (Dis) and language (Limbo),
rather than introducing a new concept.
these processes are intended to be cheap, and
as with Erlang, we can have many many thousands of them.
they mainly communicate via channels as in CSP.
(they can keep type-safe references to shared values.)
all processes share a garbage-collected heap, using
a variant of an algorithm described by Huelsbergen & Winterbottom.
the garbage collector is not copying, but does
combine predictable collection via reference
count with a `very concurrent'
sweep/mark collection algorithm (to deal with structures
with cycles).