Exercise: Adding another copyspace
Now that you have a working semispace collector, you should be familiar enough with the code to start writing some yourself. The intention of this exercise is to reinforce the information from the semispace section, rather than to create a useful new collector.
- Create a copy of your semispace collector, called
triplespace. - Add a new copyspace to the collector, called the
youngspace, with the following traits:- New objects are allocated to the youngspace (rather than the fromspace).
- During a collection, live objects in the youngspace are moved to the tospace.
- Garbage is still collected at the same time for all spaces.
Triplespace is a sort of generational garbage collector. These collectors separate out old objects and new objects into separate spaces. Newly allocated objects should be scanned far more often than old objects, which minimises the time spent repeatedly re-scanning long-lived objects.
Of course, this means that the Triplespace is incredibly inefficient for a generational collector, because the older objects are still being scanned every collection. It wouldn't be very useful in a real-life scenario. The next thing to do is to make this collector into a more efficient proper generational collector.
When you are finished, try running the benchmarks and seeing how the performance of this collector compares to MyGC. Great work!