News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on GRiSP – Erlang-based IoT hardware platform. Parent comment

Re:GRiSP – Erlang-based IoT hardware platform by vvanders on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @06:35PM (#13119231)
That's really exciting especially with respect to how Erlang's GC model works. I haven't used it in anger but everything I've read seems that Erlang doesn't have a need to stop-the-world GC since there's no shared state and processes can just drop their pool when they die without the need to collect.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:GRiSP – Erlang-based IoT hardware platform by naasking on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @07:14PM (#13119433)
Pauses for GC are per-actor for the Erlang VM, so indeed no stop-the-world, or if there is, it's a very low latency sync point where the GC to switches mode.

There are plenty of soft and hard real-time GCs though suitable for use with any GC'd language. For instance, the CHICKEN collector in [1] is an absurdly simple copying collector with an observed maximum pause time of 120 microseconds with average pauses of 1 microsecond.

Low-latency GC tends to sacrifice a little throughput though, which is why it's not more widely used. Relative to a standard concurrent MS, CHICKEN adds up to 30% in execution time, although the average seems to hover around 10-15%.

[1] ftp://ftp.inf.ufrgs.br/pub/geyer/PDP-Pos/Artigos/PDP-2011-2-TL1-artigos/PDP-2011-2-TL1-GT-A%20Study%20of%20Concurrent%20Real-Time%20Garbage%20Collectors.pdf

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:GRiSP – Erlang-based IoT hardware platform by peerst on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @07:44AM (#13122120)
Yes that also means the latency is not very long since in normal Erlang processes the process heap is also quite small so it doesn't take long to collect. Even without our planned extensions to the Erlang VM its astonishing well behaved in real world realtime applications.

Soft/hard realtime was always a spectrum and basically the point of hard-realtime is never reached in practice (if your hardware dies or glitches you miss your deadline, caches are hard to model but you't want to switch them off etc).

Even without changed VM one can enforce garbage collection at certain points which moves Erlang on the throughput/realtime spectrum more towards realtime. Not worth it if a non realtime OS schedules you but of value when controlling exactly who can preempt you (under RTEMS no-one is feasible)

[ Parent | on HN ]