[LLVMdev] GC infrastructure checked in

[Gordon Henriksen]

On 2008-01-07, at 05:29, Jon Harrop wrote:

> On Monday 07 January 2008 02:32:47 Gordon Henriksen wrote:
>
>> Everything described in GarbageCollection.html should now be live.  
>> Phew!
>>
>
> This is wonderful news! Are there any example programs using these  
> GCs?

The division of labor is such that the user program must provide the  
stack walker (in addition to the GC), so complete GC programs are  
nontrivial. This is somewhat similar to the state of exception  
handling in LLVM. It would be an excellent project to provide  
reference implementations of these facilities.

That said, the PyPy group has llvmgcroot support on a branch; you  
could ask Armin Rigo <arigo at tunes dot org> for details about  
accessing it.

On his benchmarks, Armin saw an 8% speedup vs. a shadow stack. Their  
gcc backend still outperforms the LLVM backend, though—and llvm-gcc  
outperforms that further still. So perhaps those llvm-gcc GC  
extensions could be put to good use after all! :)

— Gordon