Skip to content

Isolate MMTk-related code. #51

Open
@wks

Description

@wks

Currently, the code base, especially gc.c, is littered with ad-hoc #ifdef MMTK blocks. While it works, it is better if we can isolate MMTk-related functions and data structures into a dedicated source file, such as mmtk.c.

There are some difficulties doing so.

  1. Some functions and macros can only be accessed from gc.c. They are related to object layouts, marking, sweeping and so on. gc.c has been the only source file related to GC in the Ruby code base. This may explain why there has never been a need to expose any GC implementation details to other files.
  2. There isn't a "VM-GC interface" that makes GC pluggable. In comparison, OpenJDK 10 did a major refactoring on the GC code, and it is now able to put every GC algorithms in a separate directory. This refactoring is also key to making it possible to make MMTk one of its GC provider. See https://openjdk.org/jeps/304

Isolating MMTk-related code is one small step towards making a well-defined VM-GC interface for Ruby, because the places that need to be changed indicates the difference between GC implementations as well as places where the GC is too tightly coupled with the VM.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions