Ask HN: Hardware support for garbage collection by mainstream CPUs?

3 pointsdgudkov2 comments

Garbage collection can be viewed as a software emulation of infinite computer memory. Besides obvious technical complexity, are there any theoretical/practical reasons why mainstream CPUs don't do hardware garbage collection?

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This isn't a direct answer, but when hardware doesn't provide an "obviously useful" feature the reason is often because it wouldn't be faster. http://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html http://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-up.html

I had this crazy idea once! . "Since JVM,CLR and the likes are very popular,why not have hardware accelerated GC or a hardware which can execute java bytecode or MSIL ". May be Microsoft or Oracle should build one as they are heavily invested in GC languages :).

Turns out there are some research and implementaion on this already

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/hamm_isca09.pdf

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=554101...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle

A possible answer why this did not go mainstream https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051947

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