Sun JVM gets incremental, compacting GC

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/04/g1

by oconnor0 • 17 years ago

56 14 17 years ago

infoq.com

jcdreads• 17 years ago

Primary source (podcast):

http://mediacast.sun.com/users/dannycoward/media/PC_0002_Jam...

stcredzero3• 17 years ago

As usual, Smalltalk has already had this for years. (Both incremental and generational could run concurrently, configurable by the programmer. And no one cared. It was no big deal. Java gets it, it's news. Like about 100 other things. Word to the wise: Smalltalk is a bellweather for Java!)

modoc• 17 years ago

Why it's news:

Job listings for smalltalk on monster.com nationwide: 13

Job listings for Java on monster.com nationwide: 4,758

triplefox• 17 years ago

I find it somewhat amazing that the orders of magnitude difference isn't larger.

silentbicycle• 17 years ago

Yes, and most of the research energy that originally went into Smalltalk moved to Self, and then directly to Java.

oconnor02• 17 years ago

Right, so this isn't news in that it's new technology. It's news in that the JVM is becoming a better platform & catching up, technologically, to where other languages have been for years.

One nice thing about this is that all JVM languages get this improvement. Will it allow for more functional programming to be done? I wonder what it'll do for non-Java performance - say for Scala, JRuby, Clojure, etc.

calambrac5• 17 years ago

You don't have to wonder, the paper (http://research.sun.com/jtech/pubs/04-g1-paper-ismm.pdf) tells you. It will drop throughput a little bit, but much less than you'd maybe think given that you're gaining more predictable pauses that you'll actually be able to configure yourself.

Also, be more skeptical of what stcredzero is saying. He's dismissing this out of hand, but its pretty clear he doesn't really know what he's talking about. This actually is a cool new technology. Java has had what he's complaining about for years, the vast majority of its existence, in fact.

calambrac5• 17 years ago

The phrase "incremental and generational could run concurrently" is completely meaningless. "Incremental" implies "not concurrent", and "generational" is a feature you add so that "incremental" or "concurrent" collection can be done very quickly over a smaller reference graph.

oconnor02• 17 years ago

Well, Sun's JVM has been generational for a long time. It's the incremental & compacting implementation that is new.

Sun JVM gets incremental, compacting GC

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