Memory management with MMTk: lessons learned from replacing Ruby's garbage collector

(Angus Atkinson) If you've learned a new programming language in the past 20 years, there's a good chance it features automatic memory management. One of the most popular ways of managing memory is through a garbage collector (GC), which frees memory by regularly deallocating unreferenced data. Optimising programming languages' GC algorithms and implementations can be key to improving the performance of large scale, low-latency and high-throughput systems. However, state-of-the-art GC algorithms can be difficult to implement, which often results in new language designers trading performance for simplicity. Additionally, garbage collectors are often tightly integrated into the language runtime, which makes it difficult for existing languages to optimise their GC or switch to new algorithms altogether.
In this talk, we introduce the Memory Management Toolkit (MMTk), an Open Source runtime-agnostic garbage collection framework being developed by researchers at ANU. MMTk provides developers with a large library of high-performance GC algorithms (ranging from tried-and-tested to cutting-edge), exposed behind a unified bidirectional API. The project aims to simplify GC implementation for both researchers and the developers of new & existing programming languages alike. We discuss the lessons learned from integrating MMTk into MRI, the main interpreter for the Ruby programming language.
lca2022.linux.org.au/schedule...
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Sat Jan 15 11:40:00 2022 at Wominjeka Theatre