[LLVMdev] Improving Garbage Collection

[Frits van Bommel]

On 8 July 2011 00:07, Kenneth Uildriks <kennethuil at gmail.com> wrote:
> You don't need function parameters to be stack roots.  You already
> have a stack root for those values in the calling function, right?

Allowing parameters themselves to be stack roots allows an object that
the calling function itself no longer needs to be collected once the
called function (and everyone else, obviously) is done with it.

It would also make tail calls easier to support: if parameters can't
be stack roots, the called function would have to copy each pointer
parameter to a stack root before doing anything else, or at least make
sure the GC doesn't kick in before it does so. And it would have to do
so whether or not it's ever actually tail called, because it (usually)
can't know who calls it and how.

> Anyway, declaring the function parameters as stack roots means that
> you *must* pass pointers into the GC heap to those functions, whether
> or not it makes any difference to the function itself.  That means,
> among other things, that optimization passes for turning GC
> allocations into pool allocations or local allocations become more
> complicated.

Not if the GC is smart enough to ignore pointers that don't point into
its heap. This shouldn't be that much extra work to achieve because it
needs to figure out what object a pointer points to anyway (at least
if interior pointers are allowed). If a pointer doesn't point to an
object it knows about, it can simply be ignored.
This does depend on the structure of the GC heap though: if the GC
knows beforehand which pointers point into its own heap the "figure
out what object it points to" algorithm may be able to use some tricks
that aren't safe otherwise.