GHC Port

[steveblackburn]

GHC is a state of the art Haskell implementation with a sophisticated garbage collector. Support for concurrent collection has been recently added. That work is based in part on some ideas developed by Ueno and Ohori. Over the years GHC team members have implemented and published a number of interesting garbage collection ideas.

This project involves porting GHC to MMTk. There are at least two near-term motivations for this work:

• Providing GHC with a suite of different garbage collections.
• Allowing collectors implemented in MMTk to be evaluated in a high performance Haskell runtime.

The project will most likely follow the progression outlined in the MMTk porting guide, starting with a NoGC implementation, then progressing to a copying collector, then to one with a write barrier, etc.

The project will be undertaken collaboratively with members of the GHC community, who have already expressed their in-principle support.