Concurrent Garbage Collection for D

Leandro Lucarella
May 1st @ 3:30 PM

Duration: 50 minutes
Talk type: Presentation
Level: Intermediate
Slides
Video: [HD] [SD]

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Abstract:  Stop-the-world garbage collectors can be quite problematic for (soft) real-time applications. The pauses introduced can be disruptive to the point to make some applications inviable, like games or even low-latency servers.

The Concurrent D Garbage Collector (CDGC) was developed mainly to address this issue, by making the mark phase run in parallel with the actual application, reducing the pause times by 2 orders of magnitude. Since our systems at sociomantic labs GmbH require to have very low latency at all times, we've been using this collector for almost 2 years now with good results.

This presentation gives a brief introduction to garbage collection, describes original D's GC implementation details and explains how it has been extended to do perform the mark phase in parallel. After showing some benchmark results, shortcomings and future work and improvements are discussed.

Benefits: Learning about garbage collection and particularly about D's implementation. Discovering an alternative GC for (soft) real-time or low-latency applications.

Speaker Bio: Leandro Lucarella has been following D since about 2004 and started participating in D forums in late 2006. In 2008 he started working on the CDGC as his Software Engineering thesis, which he finished by the end of 2010. Since he got involved with D he has been a small but steady contributor. With more than 12 years of experience in the industry, in the last years he's been focusing on low-latency and distributed systems in C/C++ and moved to Berlin in late 2011 to work at sociomantic labs GmbH, a company using D as the main programming language.