PoML reference counting

 

 


This material is largely based on discussions with whitequark, who is (among other things) a friend of mine and a notable compiler engineer.



Why reference counting?


1) One goal of PoML is to explore new ideas. Tracing garbage collection has been far more extensively developed than reference counting, because naive reference counting is much slower than simple tracing GC, due to the large number of increments and decrements required. However, relatively easy optimizations can make reference counting competitive with at least simple tracing GC, so I consider that an underexplored approach.

 

2) Concurrent reference counting is easier to implement than concurrent tracing GC.

 

 

deferred reference updates

 

These optimizations are loosely based on this paper. This approach eliminates reference count updates from short-lived objects, which most objects are.

 

See also this paper for an approach to reducing pause times.

 

 

All pointers and refcounts have a bit used as a "dirty/clean" flag.
Pointers also have a bit for a "counted/uncounted" flag, which indicates if the target is refcounted.
The compiler maintains a circular buffer B1 of (pointers to) pointers to process during collection, and a circular buffer B2 of objects to potentially delete.

New objects are created in a special "nursery" memory region.

When a pointer inside the nursery is mutated, nothing else happens.

When a dirty pointer is mutated, nothing else happens.

When a clean pointer is mutated in an object outside the nursery:
The mutated pointer is marked dirty and added to B1.
If the old pointer is counted, its target has its refcount decremented immediately. If this causes a clean refcount to hit 0, that refcount is marked dirty and its object is added to B2.

At collection time:

1) The nursery is scanned. Each object not marked as expired is copied outside the nursery, and has all its counted pointers checked. If a pointer target is refcounted, that refcount is incremented; otherwise, the pointer is marked uncounted.

2) Every pointer in B1 is checked. If its source object is not marked as expired: the pointer is marked clean, and if the pointer is counted, the refcount of its target is incremented. (B1 is then cleared.)

3) The refcount of every object in B2 is checked. If >0, the refcount is marked clean. Otherwise, the object is marked as expired, the targets of its uncounted pointers are marked as expired, and the refcounts of all its clean counted pointers are decremented. If this causes a clean refcount to hit 0, that object is marked as expired. Then, this process recurses for any objects thus marked as expired. (B2 is then cleared.)

To reduce pause lengths, it's possible to only process and clear part of B2, then process more of B2 when time is available.
It's also possible to scan the nursery more often than B1 and B2 are processed.
Depth-first reclaiming of tree structures requires less GC memory; this could be done by recursively processing the first expired pointer target in each object, and prepending others to B2 by inserting them before the B2 index then moving that index backwards.

 

 

inherited references

 

Suppose we have an array A1 containing pointers to some objects, and another array A2 containing many pointers to objects in A1.

If the programmer knows that A1 can be allocated and reclaimed as a whole, then we only need a single reference count for all of A1, which is only modified when A2 is created and destroyed. If every object in A1 was reference-counted separately, we would need to update object reference counts every time a pointer in A2 was modified.

In PoML, we can declare that A1 is reference-counted, but not the objects in A1. This means that the compiler will normally not allow pointers to those A1 objects to be copied.

Because pointers to non-reference-counted targets are unique, the compiler knows that children of A1 are "owned" by the nearest reference counted node, which is A1.

When we define A2, we can include an unused immutable pointer to A1. All children of A2 then inherit that reference. (But that inheritance can be broken by reference-counted nodes in a chain.) We can do this by putting A2 in a tuple: (A2, $A1).

Now, A2 elements inheriting that A1 reference can contain pointers to objects in A1, without causing reference count updates. When copying a pointer to a non-reference-counted target object, the compiler simply checks if the pointer-containing object inherits an immutable reference to the owner of the target object. The compiler is pessimistic: if it's possible that a pointer goes somewhere not reference counted that doesn't have an inherited reference, copying that pointer is not allowed.

As of the time of writing (Nov. 23 2019), this is (I believe) a novel optimization of reference counting garbage collection.

 


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