The Squeak VM, exploring Garbage Collection. By John M McIntosh
The Squeak garbage collector's goal 10 years ago was to use a simple generational compacting collector to perform a young space GC within 10 milliseconds on a fast 68030 macintosh. A lot has changed in 10 years, machines are much faster and expectations are to run 1GB Squeak Images serving Seaside or other multi-user systems and not exhibit bad GC behavior. This talk explores how the Squeak GC algorithm works, how it has changed and recent changes made this spring to assist data collection, and alter it's historic behavior.
Mr. McIntosh comes from British Columbia, Canada. His diverse work experience includes an impressive portfolio of multinational corporations extending from Canada and Europe, to the United States, and from as far away as South America. He has spoken at past Smalltalk Solutions, ParcPlace Conferences, BOF events at OOPSLA, and at ESUGs in Europe. Currently he is the maintainer of the macintosh port of the Squeak Virtual Machine, and a member of the TK4 team working on The Future Of The Book.