Jon Coppeard

An overview of the progress we've made in the last two years development on the SpiderMonkey GC implementing generational collection and starting work on compacting.

The rough outline of the talk will be: Generational GC

movitation: performance
the generational hypothesis
implementation details:
  exact rooting
  heap postbarriers
results

Compacting GC

motivation: more free memory
implementation details
  relocation and fixup
  selecting arenas to relocate
results

Talk will be 20 minutes.

I'll give some background on garbage collection in general, and what makes it challenging to implement a collector that performs well in practice. I'll then talk about the recent work to reduce pause times and improve responsiveness with incremental collection. Finally I'll describe the ongoing work to implement exact routing, which will allow us to build a generation collector in the future.