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> And moving GC is terrible for memory bandwidth compared to both Go-style concurrent GC (which doesn't have to do bulk moves) and manual memory management. Th
by pron 16d ago
> And moving GC is terrible for memory bandwidth compared to both Go-style concurrent GC (which doesn't have to do bulk moves) and manual memory management.
This is not true. The whole point of the algorithm - the reason it was designed - is that the amount of moving is well below what's required in a non-moving collector. The downside is that the algorithm is more complicated and requires an FFI layer for FFI, but even though non-moving collectors are far simpler to implement, every language/runtime that can use moving collectors uses them (and all of those can also use non-moving collectors, too, as Java did earlier on; concurrent mark-and-sweep collectors like Go's or Java's old CMS are easier to make). Whatever you say about the complexity of moving collectors or their impact to latency before the recent invention of pauseless moving collectors, they are widely recognised fact that as the most efficient general purpose memory management solution (but also the most elaborate).
You could argue about certain workloads, but it is ridiculous to claim that the world's top memory management researchers worked for years to come up with an algorithm to be more efficient than mark-and-sweep collectors and malloc/free failed to notice that it has to move objects around a lot (the whole point of the algorithm is that it does not), and then every language that can use the algorithm chooses to use it because they also failed to notice that the algorithm that is so much more costly to implement is so obviously worse.
BTW, Go's reason for using a simpler, older style mark-and-sweep collector isn't that it's better (Google's larger V8 team opted for a moving collector), but that Go can get away with a simpler, less efficient GC because the allocation rate is lower (and we can argue over that, but at least that would be an argument over something that could actually be controversial).
Anyway, if you're interested to know how moving collectors really work, and how they were created to be more efficient than any non-moving general memory management strategy, I go through the basics in a recent talk I gave: https://youtu.be/xr73mR7ii9M https://youtu.be/xr73mR7ii9M