Re: Incremental garbage collection (was: Re: [Texmacs-dev] Boehm-gc-texmacs gc behavior)

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> I think the Boehm GC is tracking modification to already marked memory:
> set the marked pages as unwritable (using mprotect) and react on page
> faults (re-do a mark phase for modified pages).

Aha; I see; I did not know that modern computers allow you to do this...
I indeed came to see that incremental garbage collection is possible
when pointer assignment does some additional work (coloring in the terms
of Dijkstra; I found many stuff on the web, but this evil ACM library
with only proprietary articles makes it impossible to read some of
the post important papers).

> I may be wrong. If you want to dig into this GC subject, I would advise
> you to read the Further Reading section at the end of Boehm's page
> (http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/).
>
> You'll find a french description of the OCaml GC (and a general
> desscription of GC mechanisms) at:
> http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/Livres/ora/DA-OCAML/index.html (look at
> chapt. 9)
>
> In english:
> http://caml.inria.fr/oreilly-book/html/index.html (also chapt. 9)

Thanks for the pointers.