HLVM is now garbage collected!

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

Well, I have my first working GC running in HLVM now! Woohoo!

The implementation has some interesting properties:

. The GC is written entirely in HLVM's own intermediate language.

. When a new type is defined a new function to traverse that type is JIT 
compiled. So code for the GC is generated on-the-fly.

. The GC is very simple and uses a shadow stack to track roots and an 
allocated list that stores all heap allocated locations and their mark bit.

. When the GC gets involved, performance is currently awful. Two simple 
optimizations will go a long way to curing this: touch the shadow stack only 
when necessary, and do something cleverer than the current linear lookup (!) 
of allocated pointers in the GC.

. When the heap is deep the current GC stack overflows because it is not tail 
recursive. This is easily fixed.

I have applied to the OCaml Forge to create a new project for HLVM where I 
will upload my initial prototype. Just as soon as my French gets good enough 
to understand this automated e-mail... ;-)

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e