Project Snowflake: Non-blocking safe manual memory management in .NET

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/project-snowflake-non-blocking-safe-manual-memory-management-net/#

by ingve • 9 years ago

126 22 9 years ago

CyanLite2• 9 years ago

Freaking awesome! So... the inevitable question... will this get merged into CoreCLR and become mainstream?

runevault• 9 years ago

I would be surprised if MS wasn't intending to merge this in if it pans out the way they hope it will. Why else invest the resources to try and make it?

I know as someone who slings c# for the day job I'm super excited to try it out.

sebazzz• 9 years ago

True, there are many research projects of Microsoft which ended up in production. Take the Linux Subsystem for Windows (Bash) for instance, or a little closer to home: Code contracts.

crudbug• 9 years ago

Great work - +1 CLR vs JVM battle. Hoping this will get merged with CoreCLR soon. Any info on this ?

speps• 9 years ago

Does anyone know of a game engine that uses CoreCLR instead of Mono (like in Unity)?

mellinoe2• 9 years ago

I've written an amateur, hobby-level engine, described here: https://mellinoe.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/net-core-game-engi.... This was more of a personal exercise for learning and experimenting than a serious attempt at game design, so the engine isn't that advanced.

For something more professional and polished, there is Xenko, which runs on CoreCLR for some of its non-mobile targets. https://xenko.com/

Also, Unity itself doesn't really run on Mono -- it just has a scripting layer that hosts Mono on top of its C++ core. Perhaps not a useful distinction for you, but I thought I'd mention it.

(Note: I work on .NET Core at Microsoft)

CMay• 9 years ago

Do you know if this memory management work might also make it into .NET Native?

Thaxll• 9 years ago

Unity doesn't use C# for its runtime.

jackmott• 9 years ago

that isn't really coherent. it doea use c# as the main languahe for game logic and for some platforms the mono runtime

scott_s• 9 years ago

This work was also published in PLDI as "Simple, Fast and Safe Manual Memory Management" (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...). The presentation from the conference is also online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C07s5LTuTmE

algorithmsRcool• 9 years ago

No, this is a different paper and a different technique.

This paper cites "Simple, fast and safe..." in section 7 and explains the differences.

ppog• 9 years ago

It seems like this relies for some of its safety guarantees on checks in (their fork of) the C# compiler. For example, owner non-copy guarantees seem to be enforced at the C# front end level rather than in the CLR. That could cause problems for getting it into CoreCLR (and much more so the desktop CLR), as this is meant to support multiple languages; relying on a specific language front-end for safe use of a feature feels at odds with the 'common language runtime' philosophy... It would be great to see it though!

teddyuk• 9 years ago

Am I reading it right?

If you want to manage the memory allocation yourself you can.

Why not just pre-allocate a lost of objects and re-use / free those?

Think I'm missing something

Rusky• 9 years ago

It's a particular technique for managing the memory that helps you avoid accidentally using it after it's been freed/reused.

naasking• 9 years ago

And you don't incur tracing overhead for objects in the manual heap. Reused objects from the GC still incur this cost.

roskilli• 9 years ago

What I wouldn't give to have this in Go. Literally have been playing with Mmap system calls recreating something similar with mixed results...

Project Snowflake: Non-blocking safe manual memory management in .NET

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