mps VS jank

I have a library which has an extremely slow free, around 2m for large files, because of unnaturally scattered allocation patterns, but this old conservative GC didn't help at all. It was about 40% slower with libgc. mimalloc was a bit better. Best would be a properly fast GC, like mps https://github.com/Ravenbrook/mps, but this would be too much work.

The first thing you should look at is MPS (see https://github.com/Ravenbrook/mps and https://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/). It's open source, professionally maintained and very powerful, and it was used e.g. in Dylan and LispWorks.

I wonder how the MMTK compares to the venerable Ravenbrook MPS https://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/ which originated in Harlequin’s programming language implementations, particularly Dylan.

I am trying to implement garbage collection for my language because I want memory management for arrays/lists and strings. I am looking through LLVM's garbage collection page but the documentation isn't great. Are there any other resources that offer more concrete steps to implement garbage collection? Would it be wise to circumvent LLVM all together for garbage collection and only use something like the Memory Pool System? Thanks!

This post seems related to the authors of MPS (1) that seems to be a general garbage-collector to use with various languages.

Many GC'd languages really didn't bother with stack-allocating variable-size entities, and regardless of if they did then _precicely_ scanning the stack would be complicated without compiler help.

If the compiler doesn't leave any info to the GC, then it can't know if it's scanning a pointer or a float and if your GC strategy relies on compacting memory (ie moving objects) then trying to guess between a float or a pointer can become fatal.

(1) https://github.com/Ravenbrook/mps

There's an effort afoot to bring this to the Clojure world, with the lovely name jank: https://jank-lang.org

I also liked that reference since I had not heard of Jank before. It is a work in progress so I just added a calendar entry for 9 months from now to check it out. https://jank-lang.org/

There will be a lot of room for this, once I build out more of the features. In particular, there will be a lot of Clojure libraries which need to gain jank support. Clojure doesn't require "porting", so to speak, since it has a special .cljc file which can use reader conditionals to check the host that it's in (clj, cljs, cljr, jank, etc). So anywhere those libs are using Java interop, we'd need to wrap it to use native interop instead.

On the compiler and tooling itself, I have some open issues here: https://github.com/jank-lang/jank/issues

The vast majority of it is heavy C++ work, though. Outside of that, the biggest gains will come from time spent on packaging, distribution, and testing on various platforms.

And if none of that sounds interesting or applicable, don't worry. Just be sure to join the Slack channel and hang out with us. :)

On the top of using C++ for scripting, and related to the discussion of CERN's ROOT/Cling, I am developing a Clojure dialect on C++/LLVM called jank: https://jank-lang.org/

jank is a true Clojure, meaning you get interactive, REPL-based development and a whole stdlib of persistent, immutable data structures and functions to transform them. But it's also C++, so you can write inline C++ within your jank source, and interpolate jank values within that. You can link with existing native code using LLVM and you can embed jank into your existing native projects to use for scripting.

jank is pre-alpha, right now, and I've only been showing it to Clojure devs so far, but there's a huge audience of C++ devs which may be interested in introducing Clojure to their native code.

jank (https://jank-lang.org/) is a Clojure dialect on LLVM with C++ interop. In this talk, Jeaye will cover jank's use cases, some challenges around building a native Clojure dialect, and some insights about Clojure itself found only by spelunking deep into the Clojure compiler.

I wonder if Jank [1] could be such a Lisp? I haven't played around with it, but I really like the idea and would love to see it get more traction.

[1]: https://jank-lang.org/

This isn't usable yet, but in active development by the author, and looks promising: https://jank-lang.org/

Jank looks pretty legit: https://jank-lang.org/