[SGVLUG] Microsoft Reports OSS Unix Beats Windows XP

[Chris Smith]

On 11/12/05, Dustin <laurence at alice.caltech.edu> wrote:
> I've looked a bit more at that article, and the most surprising thing to
> me is that the kernel is garbage-collected.
>
> The OS kernel strikes me as the worst place ever for GC.  I'm not too
> worried about that becoming a production system.

Actually, I'd argue quite the opposite. The Linux kernel is rife with
reference counted data structures, which is essentially a poor man's
GC. If nothing else using GC would improve the ability for kernel
operations to run concurrently, probably help reduce fragmentation of
kernel space, and might even allow for faster amortized times for
memory management. Sure, GC has it's down sides in kernel space as
well, but there is reason to believe that if done right, it could be a
good thing.

--
Chris