[MLton] Porting MLton... C99?

Matthew Fluet fluet@cs.cornell.edu
Fri, 10 Dec 2004 08:29:46 -0500 (EST)


> PS. Are there any (short) papers I could read about the type of GC MLton
> implements? It would help if I understood how the code I was modifying
> worked 'in the large'.

There are no papers written up that are specific to the MLton GC.  If you
have access to a reasonably complete Computer Science library, I recommend
browsing through:
  _Garbage Colletion: Algorithms for Automatic Memory Managment_
  by Richard Jones
It is a good intro and overview.

The GC was originally a simple stop-and-copy collector, and that remains
the workhorse of the collector Within the last couple of years, Stephen
extended it to support mark-compact and a simple two generation scheme,
which generally only get invoked when the ratio of live data to physical
memory gets high.