sutton036

Since the 1950s there have been three main families of collectors: semi-space, mark-sweep and mark-compact. Almost all production GCs have been generational mark-sweep even though they exhibit pathological performance when the nursery is full of survivors because they are marked, (physically) copied and all references to them updated which is ~3x slower than necessary and is practically useful when filling a hash table with heap-allocated keys and/or values. The Beltway (2002) and Immix (2008) garbage collectors introduced the new family called the mark-region GCs. With a mark-region GC the entire heap is a collection of regions and so is the nursery generation so it can be logically aged by replacing it with another region when it is full of survivors. Sun's Hotspot JVM introduced the first mainstream mark-region GC with its G1 collector. The advent of multicore in 2005 has meant more emphasis on parallel and concurrent garbage collectors. The Staccato (2008) garbage collector ...

Time taken to insert ten million int→T bindings for T as each of int , float , complex and string using F# on .NET 4.5, OCaml 3.12 and GHC 7.4.2: On a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-3770 running Windows 7. Value types and reified generics facilitate .NET's very efficient Dictionary implementation when handling value types like int , float and complex (unmatched by any other language/VM including C, C++ and Java). F# is 50% faster than OCaml and Haskell using the reference type string perhaps because the .NET write barrier is significantly more efficient. Note: we use "int" to refer to ordinary 32-bit ints in F# and Haskell but 31-bit ints in OCaml. Using 32-bit ints in OCaml would be much slower because they are boxed (i.e. heap allocated).