This paper and excellent slide set seem very promising:

http://matsu-www.is.titech.ac.jp/~endo/papers/endo-ismm2002-gc.pdf
http://matsu-www.is.titech.ac.jp/~endo/papers/endo-ismm2002-gc.ppt

Toshio Endo and Kenjiro Taura adapted the Boehm conservative GC
to *dramatically* reduce pauses with incremental collection.  Their GC adds 
about 10% to execution times on a single core CPU, but improves
execution times over basic mark-and-sweep
on multi-core CPU -- by allowing marking to run 
in parallel on multiple cores.

This GC seems like a good fit to me.  Since most folks running Ruby already
use multi-core processors, it should be an all around performance "win".

Has anyone looked into grafting this GC into MRI?

Does anyone see any conceptual problems in doing so?

- brent



Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> In message "Re: [ruby-core:27135] better GC?"
>     on Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:55:53 +0900, Roger Pack <rogerdpack / gmail.com>
> writes:
> 
> |Could I put in a small plea for a better GC?
> 
> Yes, but unfortunately it's not small at all.  GC has a lot of
> trade-offs and difficult technical dependency.  It's not that easy to
> solve your frustration.  I am happy to be proven wrong (that means
> patches are welcome).
> 
> 							matz.
> 
> 
> 

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