Re: t and nil in pure memory?

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

On Nov 15, 2009, at 20:34, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> The big problem in GC is the trashing of the memory system due to
>> setting/resetting and reading the mark bits...
>
> Could be as well.  In that case, maybe we should move all the markbits
> to separate bitvectors like we have for cons and floats.

There are lots of changes, major or minor, that might be worth  
exploring.  Prefetching, putting mark bits on different words or  
pages, tri-color schemes, incremental marking, generational GC, etc.,  
etc.  But maybe we should also consider a more drastic change: Use  
Hans Boehm's GC library.  (Guile has recently switched to using it.   
So if my Guile-Emacs work ever catches on, use of bdw-gc would happen  
as a side effect.)  If it doesn't simply make the performance someone  
else's problem to focus on, it at least lets us share the workload  
with a wider community.

Ken