Reply To: Execution

I’ll give you the best present most recent final word about GC, but must caution that we have not yet implemented a GC and this may not be as final as we’d like.

1) Pointers reserve three bits for use by the garbage collector; hardware knows this and for example does not examine these bits when testing pointer equality. There are a set of hardware masks that are checked when a pointer is used to access memory; the three bits index into the mask, or, when storing a pointer, the concatenated bits of the pointer being stored and the address being stored to are used as the index. If the indexed bit is set then the operation traps to software. With this, one can write a generation GC that does not “stop the world” because by setting the masks and allocators right one can get a trap whenever there is an up-generation store of a pointer and add the stored pointer to its roots.

2) There are several situations in which software must be able to access program state held in the spiller. GC is one such situation, but also debuggers and various statistics and diagnostics tools as well. System software presents a trusted API for such inspection; there is no direct access because spiller state is not in application address space. The API interacts with the portal call mechanism and permission granting. For example, if the app makes a portal call passing a callback function which the service then calls, and then takes a segv in the callback, the debugger will be able to inspect the state of the callback and of the app, but not the state of the service that is between the two (unless it requests and is granted permission for that address space too, of course).

The API only has bitwise access to the contents of the spilled data stack, but not the spilled control stack. The API provides enough information to construct a backtrace, but the debugger does not have direct access to return addresses, downstack links, and the rest of the call machinery; Mill is very attentive to matters of security.

3) GC and other software such as debuggers can get permissions to mutate saved state such as spilled pointers.