For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection

Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by tomp on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:42PM (#19869802)

By "conflating" I mean that Rust's memory management technology provides just one kind of multi-threading safety (i.e. "multiple readers/single-writer" model), but to implement other kinds of multi-threading-safe algorithms/data structures, you need to transcend beyond ownership+borrowing.

I think "epoch-based memory reclamation" (which Linux kernel also uses IIRC) is still a (primitive / limited / contained) form of GC. For those that aren't familiar with it, a quote from the article @pedrocr posted:

> The basic idea is to stash away nodes that have been unlinked from the data structure (the first source of reachability) until they can be safely deleted. Before we can delete a stashed node, we need to know that all threads that were accessing the data structure at the time have finished the operation they were performing.

So basically, the runtime needs to keep track of allocated objects until it's certain there are no more references to them... sounds like GC (the difference between this and a real GC is that (1) you know there's no cross-references between the nodes, so you don't need to mark&sweep but just need to keep track of the epoch, and (2) the nature of lock-free data structures is such that threads will move to the next epoch fairly soon (unless they infinite-loop)).

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Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by pedrocr on Thursday May 09, 2019 @12:55PM (#19869924)

> By "conflating" I mean that Rust's memory management technology provides just one kind of multi-threading safety (i.e. "multiple readers/single-writer" model), but to implement other kinds of multi-threading-safe algorithms/data structures, you need to transcend beyond ownership+borrowing.

That's not "conflating" anything. You're just saying that "to do other things you need other stuff". Sure, to implement multi-threading you also need locks and semaphores and atomic variables sometimes. Rust provides all of those. There's nothing specific to GC vs non-GC there.

> So basically, the runtime needs to keep track of allocated objects until it's certain there are no more references to them... sounds like GC

Reference counting is not GC by most definitions. And if you want to define it like that Rust already has it.

> (the difference between this and a real GC is that (1) you know there's no cross-references between the nodes, so you don't need to mark&sweep but just need to keep track of the epoch, and (2) the nature of lock-free data structures is such that threads will move to the next epoch fairly soon (unless they infinite-loop)).

So the difference between this and GC is that it's nothing like GC... If reference counting, RCU, etc are all GC then there's nothing to discuss as it turns out languages like Rust have all the GC you need.

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Re:For Better Computing, Liberate CPUs from Garbage Collection by tomp on Thursday May 09, 2019 @01:39PM (#19870355)

I agree, the model of lock-free data structures is pretty much perfect for reference counting (no cycles, shallow reference tree... just needs to be thread-safe). I wonder then why epoch-based approaches are used, which (sound like they) are more difficult / tricky to implement... I honestly have no idea. The only thing that comes to mind is that they seem to require another atomic primitive (atomic increment, otherwise lock-free data structures only require compare-and-swap), which might not be available on all platforms...

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