📝§ Garbage collection

• Shadow stack—can be used to track GC roots

  • Servo uses Rust lints to ensure all GC pointers are rooted

    • Servo’s GC types are only safe because GC is conservative

• mprotect to implement a write barrier (GC)

• A generational GC can skip scanning an old generation if it is known to not contain references to newer generations

  • If objects are immutable, older memory can never point to the newly-allocated memory

• Conservative GC can relocate objects if their pointer does not occur on stack

• GC only helps with memory but not other resources

• Debugging tips

  • Using mprotect none to catch GC bugs

  • Run GC as often as possible to test it and catch bugs

Backlinks

• 📝 Resource management
• 📝 Shadow stack