mark-sweep VS lisp2-gc

Seconding the Make-A-Lisp and Crafting Interpreters recommendations. This post is also really great, it contains a hard written parser that you may learn from.

You mentioned you want to write your lisp in javascript so you'll be getting quite a lot of functionality for free: memory allocation and garbage collection. Just in case anyone reading is going to write in C, here's an excellent introduction to the topic:

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-ga...

Don't forget to spill the registers.

Never forget:

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-ga...

> Let me stress here that while this collector is simple, it isn’t a toy.

> There are a ton of optimizations you can build on top of this—in GCs and programming languages, optimization is 90% of the effort—but the core code here is a legitimate real GC.

> It’s very similar to the collectors that were in Ruby and Lua until recently.

> You can ship production code that uses something exactly like this.

> Now go build something awesome!

Bob Nystrom also has a blog, and his articles are really well written (see his post on Pratt parsers / garbage collectors). I'd also recommend going through the source code for Wren, it shares a lot of code with Lox. Despite the deceptive simplicity of the implementation, it (like Lox) is incredibly fast - it's a great way to learn how to build production grade compilers in general.

Bob Nystrom (of Game Programming Patterns, Crafting Interpreters, and dartfmt fame) also wrote a tutorial[1], of a precise as opposed to a conservative garbage collector.

Regarding register scanning, Andreas Kling has made (or at least quoted) an amusing observation[2] that your C runtime already has a primitive to dump all callee-save registers onto the stack: setjmp(). So all you have to do to scan registers is to put a jmp_buf onto the stack, setjmp() to it, then scan the stack normally starting from its address.

[1] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-ga...

[2] https://youtu.be/IzB6iTeo8kk

- http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-gar...

Might not be that hard: https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-garbage-collector/

Something else from the author that I recently stumbled upon: his LISP2 Mark Compact garbage collector [0].

I was in need of a simple garbage collector for a toy project of mine and settled on a copying collector based on Cheney's algorithm at first [1]. The author's mark compact code is so easy to read that I was able to grok it immediately and replace my original GC without trouble and save half my memory.

[0] https://github.com/munificent/lisp2-gc